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In 1996, I was part of the collective that ran the Autonomous Zone, an anarchist “infoshop” in Chicago. Our biggest project that year was hosting a conference and a set of protests against the Democratic National Convention, held in our city that August. We called it “Active Resistance, a Counter-Convention,” and in the end it drew more than seven hundred young revolutionaries from all corners of North America to strategize and to mingle. Early on in the planning process, we decided to produce a poster that could be widely distributed in advance of the event. Tony Doyle, the most gifted artist in our collective, created a beautiful design, and Vic Speedwell was assigned the task of shopping it around to find an affordable print shop. When she arrived at the innocuously named C&D Printshop on the near west side, she had no idea the owners had a radical background, much less that the business had originated two decades prior as the in-house printing press for the Sojourner Truth Organization. So it was quite a surprise when Janeen Porter looked at the poster, then looked at her husband and co-owner Don Hamerquist, and said, “I think we could make a donation for anarchy, don’t you?” As a result, the Autonomous Zone only had to pay for materials; all labor was donated.

At the time, I had vaguely heard of STO, but knew very little about the group or its history. (I had never heard of Janeen or Don, even though Don had helped found the organization, was one of its leading theoreticians, and was the only person to remain a member from beginning to end of the group’s history.) That would change over the next few years as a number of us younger Chicago anarchists became friends and comrades not only with Janeen and Don, but also with a range of other veterans of STO. Along the way, I realized that Janeen’s spontaneous decision to offer discounted printing services was not exactly exceptional in the context of her former group’s history. Throughout its existence, STO was committed to a pragmatic view of revolutionary struggle, looking for promising forms of activity and materially supporting them while offering critical perspectives and advice. Whether the terrain was the factory floor, the anti-imperialist milieu, or new social movements, the group demonstrated its firm commitment to revolution despite the dramatically changing circumstances of the seventies and eighties.

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STO was a font of new and challenging ideas, as well as a fulcrum for revolutionary action. Among the areas of work in which the group immersed itself were (and this list is by no means exhaustive): workplace organizing, GI resistance, community-based antipolice efforts, women’s and especially reproductive rights, anti-imperialist solidarity, international networking with like-minded revolutionaries in Europe and Latin America, antifascist organizing, antinuclear and disarmament struggles, radical responses to state repression, opposition to US intervention in Central America and the Middle East, and youth and student radicalism. This book places special emphasis on some of these, while effectively ignoring others. In all cases, this was the result of difficult decisions made due to space constraints when organizing a monograph that was inevitably going to be too long.

Despite this wide range of activities, it is possible to create a rough but coherent narrative arc that categorizes STO’s trajectory into three distinct periods: a workplace-organizing period lasting approximately from 1970 through 1975, an anti-imperialist-solidarity era running more or less from 1976 through 1980, and a direct-action, tendency-building phase beginning at the end of the seventies and continuing through the group’s demise in the mid-eighties. These demarcations are not exact, as all three sorts of organizing continued at some level during all three periods. They also neglect a range of other essential components of STO’s work, including a continuing commitment to autonomous organizing by working-class women and an intense focus on theoretical development and internal education. Nonetheless, this book approximately follows such a scheme, with each phase being covered by a section of the text, in order to help shed light on STO’s unique place within the political movements that emerged in the aftermath of the sixties.

At its inception in Chicago at the end of 1969, STO was heavily influenced by the work of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers. STO’s early emphasis was on organizing at the point of production, especially in large factories in the steel, auto, and manufacturing sectors. In contrast to many other groups of the same period also engaged in workplace organizing, STO rejected mainstream labor unions as a venue for struggle, to which it counterposed the option of “independent mass workers’ organizations.” The group’s members participated in the creation of several such organizations, in both unionized and non-union factories, always agitating for demands that challenged what STO described as the “bourgeois legality compromise.” This compromise doomed traditional unions, which necessarily were in the business of negotiating functional relationships between workers and management. STO’s activities within dozens of factories around the Chicagoland area resulted in hundreds of job actions during the early seventies, ranging from short-term sit-down work stoppages to longer wildcat strikes and sabotage at the worksite.

As the sixties receded further into the past and the independent labor upsurge of the early seventies waned, conflicts within STO over ideology and strategy led to a series of splits that nearly destroyed the group. The rebuilding process preserved the core commitments of the organization ideologically, but two shifts manifested. First, the group extended its reach geographically, becoming a regional organization and eventually growing to include members in a dozen states across the US. Second, STO began to emphasize the importance of national liberation struggles. Solidarity with, most prominently, the Puerto Rican independence movement and the Iranian student movement in the US, became central components of the group’s practical work. This transition produced a number of side effects, including an unorthodox take on the theoretical aspects of what Marxists called “the national question,” as well as an enhanced appreciation of the need for internal political and philosophical study.

As the eighties dawned, STO altered its strategy once again, distancing itself from the Stalinism of many of the national liberation movements it had previously supported, and turning its attention to building a revolutionary tendency within the so-called new social movements—the antinuclear movement and anti-Klan organizing, as well as youth/student, anti-intervention, and reproductive rights struggles, among others. Within this context, the group consistently encouraged militant direct action as a strategic orientation and emphasized the autonomy of all such movements. However, internal confusion about the implications of autonomy and the external pressures of the Reagan era led to a new series of splits and departures that undermined STO’s viability as a formal organization. By the late 1980s the group was defunct.

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On an intellectual level, several key themes recur throughout the group’s history. In every area and at every point in time, STO emphasized the importance of mass action, the rejection of legal constraints on struggle, the question of consciousness within the working class, the central role of white supremacy to the continued misery of life under capitalism, and the necessity of autonomy for exploited and oppressed groups, not only from capitalism and white supremacy but also from their supposed representatives, various self-proclaimed vanguards, and any other “condescending saviors.”1

Two essential theoretical innovations in particular marked STO’s contribution to the revolutionary left. First, the group re-articulated Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as an analysis of “dual consciousness,” arguing that the working class displayed both a broad acceptance of the status quo and an embryonic awareness of its own revolutionary potential as a class.2 An early pamphlet produced by STO suggested that “what is in the worker’s head is a source of power insofar as it reflects the worldview of the working class—and a source of weakness—insofar as it reflects the world view of the capitalist class.”3 The task of revolutionaries was to help expand the level of proletarian consciousness through participation in mass struggle, while challenging the acquiescence to bourgeois consciousness. STO believed that this process required the creation of a revolutionary party, but it rejected what it called the “Stalin model” of party building in favor of an eclectic mix of organizational ideas drawn from Lenin and, especially as the eighties arrived, from the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.

The second quintessential aspect of STO’s revolutionary theory was its analysis of white-skin privilege as a bulwark of white supremacy. A founding member of the group, Noel Ignatin (now Ignatiev), helped pioneer the concept by reframing ideas initially advanced by W.E.B. Du Bois, especially in his classic work, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. According to the theory, people identified as “white” benefit from material and psychological advantages that people of color are denied. STO argued that white workers must “actively and militantly reject their partial, selfish and counterfeit interests as part of a group which is favored in relation to blacks, on behalf of their total, broad and true interests as part of a class which is coming alive.”4 As a largely white group, STO saw its role as spurring the white working class in this direction and supporting organizing efforts emerging from black, Puerto Rican, and other nonwhite communities.

As the group moved closer to its own demise, a third key concept gained prominence within its theoretical universe: autonomy. Conceptually, autonomy was applied to a wide range of social groups—black people, other oppressed nations, women, youth, the working class as a whole. The list of those from whom autonomy must be sought and defended was similarly broad—capitalism and the state, but also trade unions, political parties, and even in many cases STO itself. This intense awareness of the need for real independence at the level of mass movements marked the final period of the group’s existence, and facilitated both high and low points in its existence. Closely tied to the theoretical focus on autonomy was a practical demand for militancy and a willingness to challenge legal boundaries in order to build a revolutionary movement. While there was a certain conceptual incoherence built into this constellation of ideas, most of STO’s clear-cut “successes” reflected a careful balance between acting as a radical pole inside broader struggles, on the one hand, and ensuring that mass movements had the freedom to determine their own trajectory. This was just as true in the factories of 1972 as it was in the antiwar protests of 1982. When STO failed—which was often—it was frequently because the balance was tipped too far in one direction or the other.

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A brief explanation of the title of this book is perhaps in order. For a long time, the working title was the unwieldy mouthful “Revolutionaries Who Tried to Think,” which was drawn from Ignatiev’s reflections on STO’s distinctiveness within the US left of its era. Eventually, Truth and Revolution was chosen both for its play on the group’s name and for the way in which it calls attention to fundamental questions of radical theory and practice. In the hands of the historical left, “truth” and “revolution” have too often had a troubled relationship. STO’s critique of Stalinism reflected the rejection of a methodology that presented the revolutionary party as the source of scientific knowledge and revolutionary truth. Much more recently, Hamerquist has called for “organizational forms that are mobile and flexible, and that are looking to intervene, not because they have the truth, but as a part of the development of the will to create new truths.”5 At the same time, STO itself was sometimes less than saintly in its own attempts to demarcate the supposed truth of its own positions. “Truth” is a difficult and complicated idea to define, but it is precisely this complexity and ambiguity that make the term apt as a bookend with “revolution” when conceptualizing the history of STO.6 The chapters that follow address questions of truth only obliquely, but contemporary revolutionaries have much to gain in viewing STO through the dual prism suggested by the title.

* * *

This book covers a lot of terrain. It describes events that took place during three different decades, in locations all over the world, from Chicago, New York, and Kansas City to Puerto Rico, Italy, and Iran. While focusing on the specific trajectory of a single, small organization, it attempts to shed light on the broader history of the international revolutionary left over the last half century. STO was both exemplary and exceptional when considered in the context of the movements that emerged from the end of the sixties. It grappled with a set of problems that were nearly universal—the contradictions of race and class, the failure of revolutionary struggles to establish or maintain free and egalitarian societies, the need to incorporate the work of conscious revolutionaries into mass struggles, and so forth. Yet its proposals for dealing with these problems were proudly unorthodox, drawing on a range of sources in the Marxist, revolutionary nationalist, feminist, and other radical traditions. While claiming the mantle of Leninism, STO diverged sharply from most standard interpretations of that term.

In the pages that follow, I attempt to balance an intellectual history of STO’s theoretical innovations with a social history of the group’s real world activities. This task is, of course, more easily identified than accomplished, in part because the available written materials (both published and internal) tend to focus on theory at the expense of practice. Oral history interviews with former members only partially redressed this imbalance. But for me, as for STO, it remains a fundamental premise that ideas can only obtain their value, and indeed their validation, in the messy world in which we actually live. As a result, in addition to discussions of consciousness and white skin privilege and autonomy, these pages include stories of getting, keeping, and losing jobs, reflections on popular music and spectator sports, descriptions of protests and conferences, and commentary on organizational questions that may on first glance seem needlessly obscure. The goal is not to be eclectic, but to be true to the complex life of any revolutionary group. Considered as a whole, the historical arc of the Sojourner Truth Organization has much to teach contemporary radicals, especially those aspiring to be revolutionaries who try to think as well as act. This book is intended as a modest contribution to the creation of a framework for moving forward by looking closely at a small slice of the past.

1 The latter phrase comes from the standard US translation of the lyrics to the “Internationale,” and was also part of the title of an STO pamphlet from the mid-seventies, “…no condescending saviors” by Noel Ignatin. The full stanza is:

We want no condescending saviors

To rule us from their judgment hall,

We workers ask not for their favors

Let us consult for all:

To make the thief disgorge his booty

To free the spirit from its cell,

We must ourselves decide our duty,

We must decide, and do it well.

2 The source of this term, in its usage by STO, is somewhat murky. Gramsci discusses the hypothetical worker as having “two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness).” Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 333. W.E.B. Du Bois used the phrase “double consciousness” in his classic work The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1995 [1903]), 45, to describe the experience of black people living in a white supremacist society. Despite the group’s obvious debt to Du Bois, there is no clear evidence that his work was the source of STO’s usage. Don Hamerquist, who first introduced the term within STO, recalls Lenin’s critique of trade union consciousness as an important influence in how the organization used the term “dual consciousness” in its work. Hamerquist, email to the author, October 26, 2009.

3 Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), Toward a Revolutionary Party: Ideas on Strategy and Organization (Chicago: STO, 1976 [1971]), available at www.sojournertruth.net/tarp.html (accessed February 18, 2009).

4 STO, The United Front Against Imperialism? (Chicago: STO, 1972), available at www.sojournertruth.net/unitedfront.html (accessed February 18, 2009).

5 Don Hamerquist, “Lenin, Leninism, and Some Leftovers” (2009). Available online at http://sketchythoughts.blogspot.com/2009/09/lenin-leninism-and-some-leftovers.html (accessed September 8, 2011). Hamerquist’s recent writings have engaged the work of Alain Badiou, a French radical philosopher with a Maoist background. Badiou’s approach to truth can be glimpsed throughout his work, most notably in the essays “Truths and Justice” and “Politics as Truth Procedure,” both of which appear in the book Metapolitics (London and New York: Verso, 2005). Thanks to John Steele for bringing these pieces to my attention.

6 The philosophical and political literature on truth is vast and often contradictory. Two productive if quite different starting points would be Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London and New York: Continuum, 2004 [1975]), and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2009 [2000]).