Working Class Hero: Asher Harer

 Asher Harer was born in Calexico, California on the Mexican border on August 14th, 1912. He grew up in poverty, but graduated from high school, and entered junior college. His role in organizing a student antiwar demonstration at that college in the mid-1930’s resulted in his suspension.

Newspaper accounts of that incident came to the attention of a group of pro-Soviet, but anti-Stalinist socialists in Los Angeles. Seeing him as a young man willing to fight for his progressive ideas, they sent a representative to Calexico to meet with him, and succeeded in persuading him that his desire for social justice would find wider opportunity in a big city where the labor movement was on an upsurge, and labor militants were more receptive to socialist ideas.

Asher and a friend hitch-hiked to San Francisco where he got restaurant job and was soon involved in strikes in the waiters’ union. When an opening for work on the docks occurred, he joined the International Longshore and Warehousemens Union (ILWU) and remained a longshoreman for the rest of his working life.

His devotion to his union and to the cause of the working class were demonstrated in the 1946 strike and again in the 1948 ILWU strikes where he was on the strike committee in charge of “educating” scabs. His effectiveness in that capacity is remembered fondly by many old-timers to this day.

His active involvement in the longshore union and work on the docks, important as that was, was not the only or even the main part of his life. His awareness of the class struggle and association with socialists in San Francisco led him to become a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.

Building a revolutionary party based on Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist principles became the dominant goal of his life; union consciousness, however was only a small part of revolutionary socialist consciousness. That is, the revolutionary socialist road to the emancipation of the working class and of all humanity requires a mass political movement that puts the interests of the workers as a class—not as individuals—first.

The ILWU because of the militancy and political consciousness of its membership had put the old labor slogan of “An injury to one is an injury to all,” at the very center of their union’s relations with the entire American and world working class.

In 1956, a crucial event occurred in international politics—Kruschev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. That speech astounded the world because was a sharp denunciation of many of Stalin’s crimes. It had a far-ranging effect not only among the World’s Stalinist parties, but it also opened up an opportunity for discourse among those in the U.S. Communist Party who had believed their party’s cover-up of Stalin’s anti-working-class crimes.

Asher and the SWP, taking advantage of the opportunity, sought to establish a relationship with the best of those socialists deeply affected and repulsed by the Soviet Union’s top Stalinist’s revelation—aiming to find a common platform to counter the growing assaults on labor and civil liberties.

In the early 1960’s Asher coordinated the mayoral campaign of Sam Jordan, a leader of African-American community activists from Bayview Hunters Point in 1963.

Around the same time, the victory of the Cuban Revolution and the undisguised hostility of the U.S. government towards it, again brought to the fore the principle of “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was formed nationwide. Asher along with his comrades and friends were instrumental in organizing the Committee’s Bay Area chapter and was elected its executive secretary. He led that committee in support of Cuba’s right to an independent existence in a demonstration at the Civic Center in October, 1962, as the confrontation between Soviet ships and the U.S. Navy took place, with its potential for a nuclear Armageddon.

His active political life, again went into high gear with the beginning of the Vietnam antiwar movement. In 1967, his branch of the SWP and a small number of left-liberal Democrats decided to put a proposition on the San Francisco ballot calling for the City to adopt a policy for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam. Asher, his SWP comrades and many other activists and groupings joined a coalition that organized a petition campaign and succeeded in putting an antiwar resolution, Proposition P, on the ballot.

It failed by a very narrow margin. A couple of years later the same proposition appeared on the November ballot, this time as Proposition J, and this time it won, making San Francisco one of the first cities in the country to officially adopt a policy of opposing the war.

Asher, as a national leader of the SWP, played a key role in convincing the antiwar movement that the most effective way to win the American people—including the GIs themselves—to oppose the war in Vietnam was by advancing the demand “Bring the Troops Home Now,” as the adopted slogan of the Vietnam antiwar movement.

In addition to working as a longshoreman and being active in the union, as well as maintaining a high level of involvement in the struggle to build a revolutionary party of socialist workers, Asher found time to educate young people in the fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxism.

>> The article above was written by Paul Colvin, and is reprinted from the March 2004 issue of Socialist Viewpoint magazine.