JoshMarty Goodman, revolutionary #socialist worker Bolshevik, militant trade unionist, anti-imperialist/antiwar leader, civil libertarian, anti-racist fighter and jazz enthusiast, died in late March, 2024 of a heart attack. He was 74.
Marty’s friends, comrades and trade union activists will celebrate his extraordinary life
Friday, June 7, 6-9 pm at Marty’s Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 headquarters, 195 Montague St, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY
https://socialistaction.org/2024/05/04/remembering-marty-goodman-working-class-fighter-and-revolutionary-socialist/
Remembering Marty Goodman: Working Class Fighter and Revolutionary Socialist
By Jeff Mackler [Photo and caption above published in Haiti Liberté newspaper] Marty Goodman, revolutionary socialist, worker Bolshevik, militant trade unionist, anti-imperialist/antiwar leader, civil libertarian, anti-racist fighter and jazz enthusiast, died in late March, 2024 of a heart attack. He was 74. Marty’s friends, comrades and trade union activists will celebrate his extraordinary life on Friday, June 7, 6-9 pm at Marty’s Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 headquarters, 195 Montague St, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Sponsored by Socialist Action, and TWU Local 100, both of which Marty devoted some four decades of his life to, Marty’s memorial celebration is co-sponsored by UNAC (United National Antiwar Coalition), the national Julian Assange Defense, Haiti Liberte´ newspaper, New York-New Jersey Cuba Si Coalition, and the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Marty devoted his passion, enthusiasm, skill, and energy in leadership capacities to these and other labor and social justice organizations. Goodman’s memorial meeting endorsers also include the Freedom Socialist Party and the United Front Committee for a Labor Party. A bit diminutive in physical stature, Marty was an unmatched giant in his physical participation in movement events, often attending 2, 3, 4 or 5 rallies, picket lines, marches, public forums and movement events daily! Marty’s associates often commented that they rarely attended any event where Marty was not present, usually with a stack of socialist newspapers and/or his weekly Socialist Action newsletter and solidarity fact sheets on the critical issues of the day. An incisive and prolific socialist journalist/activist, Marty’s enduring commitments found him in far away places around the world. He was a frequent visitor to beleaguered Haiti and contributor to the New York-based English-language publication Haïti Liberté. “The Hell That Is Haiti” His 2020 book, “The Hell That Is Haiti: 200 Years of Racism And Imperialist Intervention,” recounts the historic and present horrors imposed on Haiti and on Haitian refugees by the US government. Nearly a half century ago, when Marty was a youthful political activist in South Florida, he joined to help lead the newly-formed Haitian solidarity organizations that mobilized to oppose the Reagan administration’s mass deportation of Haitian refugees, who had fled the U.S. government-backed Haitian dictatorships. Marty wrote: “The history of the fight against the racist deportation of Haitians, the criminal U.S./UN occupations and the super-exploitation of Haitian labor is a long one. Suffice to say that it must be viewed in the context of 200 years of U.S. imperialism and its evil twin, racism. Make no mistake, this outrage has the unmistakable teeth marks of two equally ravenous villains, the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin representatives of the capitalist system itself!” “Three-quarters of the Haitian population live on U.S. $2 or less per day….” Marty wrote. “Sweatshop labor is expanding in Haiti, where bosses have regularly flaunted the starvation minimum wage and trample upon workers’ rights.” Ever recounting Haiti’s revolutionary history and organizing to oppose U.S. wars of intervention, including new U.S.-U N plans to intervene and conquer in the interests of the U.S. corporate elite today, was always at the forefront of Marty’s priorities. “Haiti was born in revolution as the world’s first and only successful slave revolution (1791-1804),” he wrote, “It was won arms in hand and turned the world upside down, no less so than the Russian revolution in its time. Haitian revolutionaries entered the U.S. slave south promoting rebellion.” Marty’s Florida friends organized a Miami memorial last week attended by 25 Haitian activists, who remembered Marty’s contributions decades ago. In the face of today’s threats to once again intervene in Haiti Marty’s flyers declared: “U.S./UN Out of Haiti and Stay Out! Self-determination for the people of Haiti! Build Haiti Solidarity in the Belly of the Beast!” Palestinian freedom Marty’s December 27, 2023 Socialist Action book review of Rashid Khalidi, “The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-1921” is another apt example of his passion for understanding history as a guide to action. Marty wrote, “I was raised in a working-class Jewish home in South Florida during the 1950’s and 60’s. Like other Jews that I knew I was terrified at what seemed to be a sea of Jew-hating Arabs threatening poor peaceful Israel. But on reading iconic left journalist I.F. Stone on Israel he helped shake me out of my deep sleep. In delving deeper into Israel’s bloody record – difficult to obtain in those days - I discovered that the Zionist propaganda that I was raised on was all bullshit.” Marty, who rarely missed a New York City demonstration protesting today’s U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Palestine, continued, “Today, thankfully, more resources in English are available. Rashid Khalidi’s new book makes an extraordinary contribution to a growing list of honest literature about Zionism. He begins with Great Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration that ceded a disproportion of its colonial “Palestine Mandate” to the Jews who were only 6 percent of the population. 90 percent of the region was Arab. The Balfour Declaration did not even mention Arab peoples in Palestine.” Marty’s lengthy review concludes: “Rashid Khalidi has given us a mighty tool in exposing and defeating the racist lies of Zionism. The entire movement for justice in Palestine is in his debt.” Champion of civil liberties and democratic rights Labor’s historic maxim, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” was Marty’s credo. He chaired solidarity rallies for persecuted and imprisoned civil liberties attorney Lynne Stewart. He tirelessly attended for 40 years every Philadelphia mobilization for innocent, and police-framed revolutionary fighter Mumia Abu-Jamal. To his last day he served on the national steering committee of Assangedefense.org, never missing a national Washington, D.C. mobilization to demand Julian Assange’s freedom and defend his free speech and free press rights. Socialist Action’s webinars Marty was central in the planning of Socialist Action’s ongoing webinars on a wide range of critical issues. His friendship and collaboration with key movement leaders, won by his always inclusive, united front and non-sectarian support to every movement cause, brought a wide rage of leading fighters to our events, focused on Haiti and Palestine, the labor movement, Cuba solidarity, civil liberties, antiwar-anti-imperialist-anti-racist struggles, socialist politics and more. Marty planned and helped prepare Socialist Action’s popular webinar last year, “Palestine Will Be Free, From the River To The Sea,” with Palestine leader Lamis Deek, UNAC’s national coordinator Joe Lombardo, Electronic Intifada editor Nora Barrows Friedman, and this writer. Union activist-leader Marty spent more than three decades as a New York City toll booth station agent and Transport Workers Union Local 100 activist/leader. He was elected to the union’s executive board some 25 year ago, receiving the union’s highest vote total. “Everyone knew Marty,” said TWU’s Chief of Publications and Marty’s decades long friend, Alan Saly, who recounted that during Marty’s election campaign for the union’s executive board he personally visited and distributed his campaign literature to each and every subway station in the NYC transit system, that is, to some 472 stations!!! When I explained to Marty that his proposal to do this was not feasible, he respectfully disagreed and proceeded to make it happen. Labor solidarity Marty made yeoman efforts to join every union picket line, from the UAW’s to the Teamsters, to SAG and AFTRA mobilizations recently. Building union solidarity and union power was always his central pre-occupation, but always with a critical edge. His recent flyer championing the UAW’s recent strike concluded in bold: “Solidarity with the auto strike! Mobilize Labor! Extend the strike to all plants! Smash the tier system, pension cuts, pay rip-offs, and all concessions! Always counseling against labor’s subordination to capitalism’s twin parties, Marty decried the new UAW leadership’s recent declaration of support to the Biden campaign and repeated his life-long advocacy of a massively expanded, democratically-organized U.S. labor movement in alliance with all the oppressed and exploited, along with the formation of an independent Labor Party to champion labor’s cause at the point of production and in the political arena. Biden’s anti-union rail strike legislation On December 7, 2022 following the Biden administration engineering legislation stop a planned national railroad workers’ strike Marty’s headline article stated: “Stabbed in the back: Biden signs union-busting order! Defend the right to strike! Labor needs its own party! His stinging denunciation of Biden’s crushing blow began, “After unions wasted millions of dollars backing Democratic Party politicians, ‘pro-union’ Joe Biden stabbed the railroad workers in the back. Overwhelmingly, the Democratic and Republican parties backed the rotten deal negotiated by Biden, the rail companies and the rail unions. The agreement did not include even a single paid sick-day, despite the record profits of the rail companies – $21 billion so far this year alone!! At least some paid sick days are prevalent within most U.S. work locations, even though there is no legal requirement to do so, unlike every major western country. Rail workers usually work outside, sometimes in sub-zero weather. With no paid sick days – and with Covid still killing hundreds each day – Biden’s deal is just plain inhuman!” Abolish the Taylor Law! Marty was a lifelong opponent of the 1966 union-busting New York State Taylor Law that bans all public employee strikes and imposes draconian multi-million dollar daily fines on unions and on individuals who dare to defy it. He wrote “The union-busting Taylor Law has served to shield Wall Street and the giant New York banks from aggressive union demands to defend a worker’s standard of living, working conditions and job security.” Advocating, massive, coordinated and united strike action to challenge the Taylor Law has long been at the heart of Marty’s strategic orientation to building and sustaining union power to advance labor’s cause. Labor solidarity in the US and worldwide Marty travelled to the far reaches of New York City to join with Chris Smalls’ Amazon Labor Union mobilizations in their fight for a union contract at Staten Island’s huge Amazon warehouse. This same solidarity was demonstrated in Marty’s visits to revolutionary Cuba, whose 1959 socialist revolution continued to inspire him to his last day. Marty worked closely with his New York-New Jersey Cuba Si Coalition to build support for last year’s visit to the UN and to a large public solidarity meeting honoring Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel He journeyed across Atlantic where he joined with our Fourth International New Anti-Capitalist (NPA) comrades’ and a striking transit workers union contingent in Paris, where a million French workers mobilized to challenge French President Macron’s move to extend the pension retirement age two years, from 62 to 64. And to the other side of world to Myanmar (Burma), from where Marty’s July 27, 2015 Socialist Action newspaper article entitled, “Racist attacks on Muslims in Myanmar” opened with: “The military regime and fascist monks within the Buddhist clergy in Myanmar have been waging an ethnic war against the Rohingya, a mostly Black Muslim minority living in the southwest of the country. Violence against the Rohingya erupted in 2012, leaving villages torched, up to 300 dead, and 140,000 fleeing their homes in terror. It was the worst example of ethnic cleansing in the region in decades. Cops merely watched the spiraling violence.” Marty scored the U.S. ”pivot to Asia,” with the U.S. and the CIA backing the Myanmar regime, aimed at displacing the present influence of capitalist China’s and its Belt and Road initiative. Defending Venezuelan Embassy in Washington Marty was front and center in Washington, D.C. at the Venezuelan Embassy in helping to defend and provide food and supplies to the Venezuelan-government backed U.S. activists, Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, Adrienne Pine and David Paul. These embassy defenders, who were subsequently arrested and later acquitted, insisted that Venezuela’s Embassy not be violated by US cops and the FBI. They defended Venezuela’s Embassy from April 10 to May 16, 2019 in the face of often violent U.S.-backed mobs claiming to represent the spuriously U.S.-appointed corrupt Venezuela opposition figure Juan Gaidó, who the U.S. insisted was Venezuela’s real president rather than Nicolas Maduro. While Marty was always a staunch critic of the pro-capitalist policies of the Maduro government, advocating the formation of a revolutionary socialist party to challenge Maduro’s policies, he unconditionally supported Venezuela’s right to self-determination – to be free from all U.S. imperialist intervention. “Outrage over the racist murder of Jordan Neely! No trust in cops, courts or politicians! Stay in the streets! This racist system has got to go!” These were Marty’s newsletter headlines following the May 1st New York cop murder of Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man. Marty declared that “Neely’s killing revealed the brutal gulf that exists between rich and poor, Black and white in New York City. Neely died at the hands of ex-Marine Sargent Daniel Penny, who applied a deadly chokehold on him inside a subway F train. Neely, who had mental illness, cried out, ‘I’m hungry! I’m ready to die!’ When police arrived, Penny was questioned but soon released without charges by the racist NYPD, without protest from Democratic Party Mayor Eric Adams, an ex-Major in the racist NYPD.” “No doubt, if it was a Black man that had strangled a white man,” Marty insisted, “he would have been thrown into a NYC jail immediately – and likely get beaten-up by racist cops on the way! [Emphasis in italics in original] “Ten days later charges were finally filed against Penny for 2nd degree murder after much public outrage and many demonstrations, including an occupation of the train tracks where Neely died.” “Homelessness is at a crisis stage,” Marty continued, “peaking under Bloomberg, De Blasio and now Adams. NYC, under Democratic Party rule, has an unprecedented homeless population of 74,000. Nationally, under Biden, there are nearly 600,000 homeless in the richest country in the world! African-Americans are only 13 percent of the U.S. population but 40 percent of the homeless. Let’s stay mobilized and in the streets. Justice for Jordan Neely!” As usual Marty was present at the Nealy protests. No to all U.S. imperialist wars! Free Palestine! Marty was among the leading activists and founding members of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), attending all of its national conferences held in cities across the country over the past 14 years. Were it not for his untimely death he was set to be my hotel roommate at UNAC just-concluded April 5-7 St. Paul, MN national conference attended by 400 antiwar activists across the country. This UNAC conference projected ongoing and ever massive united and powerful mobilizations against all U.S. wars and especially against the U.S.-backed genocidal war against the Palestinian people. Day in and day out, Marty rarely missed participating in the multitude of New York protests condemning U.S. support to the racist, Zionist, apartheid, colonial Israeli regime. He was often among the protests respected and inspiring speakers. The St. Paul conference’s multi-page brochure, with UNAC’s draft resolution, past adopted policy positions, and the conference agenda, opened with a brief photo story memorializing Marty and honoring his contributions. No to the U.S./NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia Marty’s Ukraine newsletter has a section entitled, “Maidan’s rooftop fascist snipers.” It summarized the origins of the U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia at a time when the U.S. left was deeply divided on this critical question. Marty wrote: “Today’s unfolding Ukraine tragedy began in February 2014 when rooftop fascist snipers opened fire on Maidan protestors originally assembled to resist the Victor Yanukovych government’s austerity measures. The fascists murdered 100 in cold blood, [Editor: today attested to via the judicial findings a few weeks ago of the Ukrainian government’s official inquiry] including some of their own for good measure. Yanukovych, the elected president, was instantly blamed and pilloried by the world’s corporate media. He fled for his life.” Marty’s flyer continued with the following sub-headline and paragraphs: U.S.-backed fascist coup in Ukraine “It mattered not that US representative to the European Union, Victoria Nuland, had inadvertently revealed that the rooftop assassins were of the fascist Svoboda Party and Right Sector ilk and not Yanukovych’s military. The armed fascist thugs that had come from across Ukraine and beyond to dominate the Maidan events, replete with US Senator John McCain sharing the stage with fascist orators and Nuland handing out U.S. friendship cookies to boot. The armed thugs stormed the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, banned the two largest and majority parties from entrance, declared themselves the new government and instantly approved a series of reactionary “laws” while appointing themselves, including leading pro-Nazis figures, to head five government ministries and high posts in the military a ndthe economy. They banned the Russian language from schools and public institutions and ordered the Ukrainian Army, replete with its now formally integrated fascist Azov, Aidar, Dnipro and Tornado battalions, to march on the Donbas in the east to take control of this largely Russian-speaking population. The fascist gangs, now with “government” approval, attacked anti-coup demonstrators across the country. In Odessa, they murderer 48 coup protestors outright, setting a trade union building afire and slaughtering survivors who were compelled to leap off the flaming edifice.” [For a full account of the U.S.-backed fascist-led Ukrainian coup see Socialist Action’s booklet “Ukraine in Turmoil” by this author]. A life devoted to the fight against U.S. imperialism Marty never tired of actively and directly engaging in political actions, in the streets, in the mass movement and in literary formats, aimed at educating working people that the source of all of today’s social, economic and political horrors is the capitalist system itself, a system based on the elite ruling class minority having ruthless control of the nation’s wealth, and all key military and political institutions. The U.S. today maintains 1100 military bases in 110 countries. It daily orchestrates and finances, for profit, wars of conquest and intervention worldwide, today centering on its unconditional support to the Zionist genocide in Palestine, to the Ukraine war against Russia, to the new wars waged today against Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and beyond. Marty never ceased arguing that the U.S. war machine’s atrocities include wars of direct and indirect intervention on every continent – drone wars, “special operation wars,” sanction wars, assassination wars, and embargo-blockade wars. These wars are matched by ever-intensifying wars against working people at home and by increasingly catastrophic assaults on the environment that threaten life on earth itself. Socialist Action’s election campaigns Marty was among Socialist Action’s most prominent election campaigners, organizing webinars and public meetings and rallies in New York and beyond to promote our 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns. In 2020 he travelled to Oakland, CA to help build support for Socialist Action’s national “Vote Socialist: Jeff Mackler for President” election campaign rally attended by100 activist supporters. Marty was a rounded revolutionary, whose interests included music, art and literature. He had a special passion for jazz and an extensive collection of the works of jazz musicians, past and present. He wrote incisive reviews, always with a political edge, of films and concerts and new works focused on jazz history and literature. Marty Goodman devoted his life to challenging capitalist rule, to the organization of working people in the US and everywhere in independent, democratic fighting trade unions, to building mass working class parties based on a renewed trade union movement in alliance with the oppressed, and to the construction of revolutionary socialist parties aimed at winning the vast majority to the struggle for the socialist future. He was among Socialist Action’s finest. We honor his memory and contributions to our common cause and pledge to continue his work. Join us! Send donation via socialistaction.org
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