Founded in Chicago in 1969 from the rubble of the recently crumbled SDS, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) brought working-class consciousness to the forefront of New Left discourse, sending radicals back into the factories and thinking through the integration of radical politics into everyday realities. Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies. Michael Staudenmaier is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois-Urbana.
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Michael Staudenmaier. Truth and Revolution
Foreword By John Bracey
Acknowledgements
Introduction: “A Donation for Anarchy”
Part One: The Working Life
Chapter One: 1969, The Revolution That Didn’t Happen
Chapter Two: The Petrograd-Detroit Proletariat
Chapter Three: “A Science of Navigation”
Part Two: Dreams Found and Lost
Chapter Four: Reorganization in Difficult Times
Chapter Five: Iran and Cleveland, Anti-Imperialism in Theory and Practice
Chapter Six: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics in a Revolutionary Organization
Part Three: The River is Dry
Chapter Seven: Building a Tendency, but How?
Chapter Eight: Autonomy in STO, From Dialectics to Diabolics
Conclusion: Reading STO Politically
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
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As time passes, and events that one participated in decades ago have become the stuff of history, one often faces the reality that too many accounts by younger scholars bear scant resemblance to one’s memories. Too often scholars ignore the recollections of participants that do not buttress their own preconceived conclusions. I am pleased that Michael Staudenmaier’s Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) breaks from that mold. I was active in Chicago Black and left politics during the 1960s. I knew or worked with several of the key figures discussed in this study, and met others of them during subsequent years. Staudenmaier’s account as far as possible gets it right.
Staudenmaier recounts how the STO attempted over a decade and a half to hold on to their principles while confronting an increasingly inhospitable environment. Staudenmaier makes a case without rancor, but with great care and sympathy, that their efforts to achieve any lasting change was a failure and that the organization’s demise was a tragedy, though largely, it is hard to see how the outcome could have been otherwise.
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46 C.L.R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986 [1950]), written in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, represents the most comprehensive of James’s many attacks on Stalinism.
47 Noel Ignatin, “Without a Science of Navigation We Cannot Sail in Stormy Seas, or, Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know,” in The Debate Within SDS: RYM II vs. Weatherman (Detroit: Radical Education Project, September, 1969).
