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In the fall of 1973, a six-day long wildcat strike took place at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois.80 About 150 men, mainly black and latino, refused to work in the twister department of the cable plant, where telephone cables were wound together by machine. Although the strikers were officially members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), they viewed the union with total disdain because of its cozy relationship with the company. When the company laid off several employees and told the remaining workers they would need to pick up the slack, union officials counseled the men to accept the changes while their concerns were investigated. No doubt thinking of the many accidents caused by previous management speed-ups, the workers instead decided to shut down the department and walk out.

The strikers organized themselves well, and in addition to demanding a reduction in the work load back to its previous level, the removal of a racist foreman, the creation of a rest area near their department, and access to better medical facilities, they also demanded a permanent negotiating committee for the department, elected by the workers to deal directly with the company when grievances arose (thus bypassing the union altogether). The men elected a temporary negotiating committee made up of one black and one latino worker from each shift, and they immediately established a picket line to raise plant-wide awareness of their actions. The company was willing to meet with the negotiating committee, but no concessions were forthcoming, and the workers were told to return to work by the following week or be fired en mass. IBEW officials told the workers their strike was illegal and that no aid would come from the union if they didn’t end the walkout by the company’s stated deadline.

A total of 26,000 workers were employed at the massive facility, and in living memory there had never been any sort of organized work stoppage at the plant, whether authorized or wildcat. Given the miniscule numbers in the twister department, the strike was hardly major news to the outside world. For much of Chicago’s left, however, the implications were significant. The walkout was seen as more evidence of the growing militancy of workers in heavy industry, and as a prime opportunity to distribute radical literature and recruit new members. But there was a problem: the strikers weren’t interested. As one worker explained, “We don’t want any communists, socialists, movies, raps, leaflets, newspapers, newspaper interviews, photographs, lectures or anything else.”81 Most Marxist organizations viewed this sort of rejection as a kind of working-class anticommunism and abandoned the struggle in frustration.

One of the only left groups that established ongoing communication with the strikers was the Sojourner Truth Organization, which had been observing the Hawthorne Works since at least May 1971. That month, the first issue of the Insurgent Worker focused heavily on problems there and, in an editorial provocatively entitled “Western Electric: We Shall Bury You,” opined that “if there is any crime against the working people for which Western Electric can escape responsibility, we haven’t been able to discover it.”82 Two years later, when the twister department workers asked the Labor Committee of the Chicago branch of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) for advice on the legality of the strike, several STO members on the Committee were able to establish contact with the strikers.83 The men accepted both legal assistance and an offer to print leaflets on STO’s press. According to one STO member, “in this situation, one in which we had no direct influence, we felt the best we could do was to ready ourselves to help execute any plans the workers would come up with, putting our full resources and ideas at their disposal if they desired.”84 Ten thousand leaflets, written by the strikers and printed by STO, were distributed to other workers at the plant, and having received some key legal advice from the NLG Labor Committee, the men found themselves negotiating from a position of strength.

After six days, and with the pressure building, the company management agreed to every one of the workers’ demands, but in exchange they required that the men stop discussing the situation with other workers. Unfortunately, this “code of silence” proved to be the undoing of the strike gains, as the company proceeded to transfer the most militant workers—including the original members of the permanent negotiating committee—to other departments and otherwise disrupt the momentum gained from the immediate victory. Having deliberately accepted the limits the men placed on outside involvement in the strike, STO could only stand by and watch this final act play out, despite its assessment that broad solidarity efforts, within the factory and outside it, were the only chance for long-term success in the plant.

There are literally hundreds of stories much like this one, describing various workplace interventions made by the Sojourner Truth Organization during the early seventies. In this case, the course of events reflects both what STO had in common with other left groups—an emphasis on organizing at the point of production—and what made the group unique—a commitment to the autonomy of workers in struggle. At the same time, the course of the Western Electric wildcat strike is representative of both the strengths and the weaknesses of STO’s approach to workplace organizing. Before assessing these aspects of the group’s work, however, it is essential to understand why STO (and other left groups) were drawn to situations like the twister department walkout in the first place.

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The interest of seventies radicals in heavy industry has its roots deep in the Marxist tradition, in Karl Marx’s theory of history. Marx believed that the development of human history was a dialectical process that necessarily went through several distinct stages, including primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, and finally socialism and communism.85 Each stage made the next one possible (or inevitable, according to some versions of Marxism), so that capitalism grew out of the internal contradictions of feudalism and could not have simply emerged spontaneously from early class societies like ancient Rome. At its core, this theory of history recognizes the interplay between objective conditions like the available level of technology, and subjective conditions such as social norms and modes of organization.

Consistent with this theory, Marx argued that capitalism necessarily produced the seeds of its own destruction in the form of the working class.86 One distinctive element of capitalist economics is industrial production in the context of the factory. The creation of a class of workers whose lot in life is to staff the factories is a double-edged sword, however. As Marx argued,

The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditioned by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under its rule does the proletariat gain that extensive national existence which can raise its revolution to a national one, and only thus does the proletariat itself create the modern means of production, which become just so many means of its revolutionary emancipation. Only bourgeois rule tears up the material roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which alone a proletarian revolution is possible.87

One key way in which capitalism conditions the development of the industrial working class, says Marx, is through the imposition of discipline in the factory. Workers are forced to conform to various schedules, and they are also obligated to cooperate in order to complete their tasks. As a result, the proletariat is “a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”88 Further, in an era before rapid transit, factory workers necessarily lived near their workplace, and thus near each other. And as Lenin later noted, this “concentration of the industrial proletariat” “enhances their class consciousness and sense of human dignity and enables them to wage a successful struggle against the predatory tendencies of the capitalist system.”89

As a method, Marxism’s value lies in its ability to predict the future course of events by analyzing history. From this perspective, the experiences of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were seen by later Marxists as a confirmation of the importance of the industrial working class.90 The centrality of the Petrograd workers to the inspiring but abortive events of 1905, and the correlation between the subsequent expansion of industrialization in Russia and the success of the revolution in 1917, convinced many revolutionaries in all parts of the world that, as Antonio Gramsci put it, “the industrial proletariat [is] the only class of the people that is essentially and permanently revolutionary.”91 The universality of this claim was later challenged by the experiences of the Chinese revolution and the writings of Mao, but the lessons of the Russian experience were still seen by most Marxists as applicable to advanced industrialized countries such as the United States.

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In the late sixties, at a point when many North American revolutionaries had turned their backs on working class, three major experiences brought renewed attention to the idea that the industrial proletariat was the revolutionary agent: the French General Strike of 1968, the Italian “Hot Autumn” of 1969, and the early successes of the Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. In each case, the militant actions of factory workers reverberated across a society in the midst of great upheaval, and in the French and Italian cases, the strikes came close to fomenting revolution.

The French events of May and June 1968 began innocuously enough as a student strike at an elite university in Paris on May 2, not unlike the occupation of Columbia University in New York City that took place the same month.92 Unlike at Columbia, however, the French strike spread quickly to other universities and other parts of the country. Cycles of increasing confrontation between students and police led to street fighting and the creation of barricades in many parts of the city, which quickly brought the conflict national attention. Young workers began to fraternize with the student strikers, and as the police repression became more outrageous, popular support swung toward the students, resulting in a massive demonstration of almost a million people in Paris on May 13. The next day, a series of factory occupations began, with workers striking initially in solidarity with the students, while also adding their own demands. By late May, nearly 10 million workers were on strike, at least 100 workplaces were occupied, and France seemed on the verge of revolution.

Sadly, the momentum of the French general strike dissipated quickly in early June. The primary reason for this about-face was the state’s carrot-and-stick strategy. On the one hand, the major unions, including especially the powerful Communist Party-led General Confederation of Labor (CGT), continuously badgered the workers into making concrete—and “reasonable”—demands that were then partially granted by the various plant managers. At the same time, French president General Charles de Gaulle made it publicly clear that a continuation of the strikes would result in a military occupation of the country, with deliberate, if unstated, echoes of the bloody repression that crushed the Paris Commune of 1871. Fear combined with partial victory to undermine the revolutionary potential of the May–June events, and by the end of summer there was little evidence to remind visitors of the uprising that had just concluded. Nonetheless, among Marxist radicals in North America, the broad importance of the general strike was considered reminiscent of the Petrograd experience of 1905, while the actions of the trade union bureaucracies reinforced left-wing skepticism of the official labor movement.

A little more than a year after the French general strike ended, the Italian industrial working class rose up in a widespread rebellion known as the Hot Autumn.93 When a number of major union contracts came up for renewal simultaneously in the fall of 1969, the collaboration between the company bosses and the union bureaucrats was plain to see. At the same time, the Italian government was in the beginning stages of a lengthy campaign to foment fascist paramilitary violence against leftists and working-class militants. For instance, the left charged that clandestine organizations of the far right with ties to the Italian state were responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in and around Milan over the course of 1969. But in contrast to the French situation, where partial concessions and the fear of repression had helped pacify the workers, major Italian factories like Fiat and Pirelli were in large part staffed by internal migrants from southern Italy, whose agrarian backgrounds included extensive experience with direct action and sometimes violent confrontation, but only limited previous interaction with trade unions. As a result, maneuvering by union officials failed to impress the rank and file, while incidents of fascist terror to a great extent only reinforced the militancy of the working class.

The Hot Autumn featured a number of factory occupations, and ultimately resulted in enormous concessions from management, including an average wage increase of almost 25 percent. More importantly, however, the Italian events highlighted the role of a type of permanent organization of workers outside the trade unions. The two most important of these organizations were Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) and Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle). Both groups attempted to intervene as conscious revolutionaries in the wide range of working-class struggles typified by the Hot Autumn, but did so neither as representatives of a vanguard party nor as partisans of the traditional labor unions. In the process they built networks of factory committees on a city-wide and even regional basis. This new form of organization was paralleled by the development of new theories of revolution based on the experiences of Italian workers in struggle. These theories were grouped under the general heading of operaismo, or “workerism.”94 The key theoretical innovation to come out of the Italian context was “autonomy,” meaning the autonomy of the working class not only from capital, but also from its “official” representatives in the unions and from its would-be vanguards in the Leninist left. In the North American context, most of the New Communist Movement took inspiration from the Hot Autumn’s factory occupations, while ignoring or rejecting its organizational and theoretical innovations.95 For STO, however, these elements were to prove decisive in the creation of a novel approach to workplace organizing.

Closer to home, the trajectory of the various Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) and later the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit was perhaps even more inspiring than the Italian and French events, even though it was much smaller in its impact and even more fragile in its outcomes. The inspiring aspect of the Detroit experience was precisely in its location: Detroit was a) in the United States rather than in Europe, and b) largely black in a country where all recent radical movements had either emerged from the black community or else in response to movements within the black community. The radicals who subsequently formed the League had in fact established direct contact with many of the Italian radicals in the winter before the Hot Autumn, when John Watson, who was later to serve on the League’s Executive Committee, traveled to Rome for a conference on anti-imperialism.96 As was noted in Chapter One, Detroit was hardly unique in producing militant rank and file labor struggles, but the sophistication of the LRBW gave the city enough national prominence on the left that, decades later, Noel Ignatiev could still speak of the “Petrograd-Detroit industrial proletariat” as the model for STO’s initial forays into workplace organizing.97

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Having recognized the importance of Detroit, and of the general wave of wildcat strikes and other workplace struggle of the late sixties and early seventies, the question remained, how to explain them? Why was the labor peace of the post-World War II era eroding so quickly? For much of the Marxist left, the answer lay in a combination of Leninist dogma and romantic admiration for the black liberation movement. For the Sojourner Truth Organization, however, the reasons were more complex, and provided the key to a proper revolutionary strategy.

In attempting to understand the seemingly spontaneous militancy of industrial workers as the sixties progressed, STO and in particular Don Hamerquist turned to the theories of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.98 Gramsci was a gifted organizer and thinker who was active in Marxist politics in Italy throughout most of his relatively short life. After the Russian Revolution he helped create the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), and partly as a result, he was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926, where he remained until his death in 1937 at age forty-six. While confined, he wrote regularly, and produced a series of works, known collectively as The Prison Notebooks, that went unpublished until long after his death. Here, Gramsci developed his signature contribution to revolutionary theory, the idea of “hegemony.” In general terms, hegemony describes the hold that bourgeois consciousness exerts over the worldview of all who live under capitalism. That is, the parameters of a capitalist economy—wage labor, exploitation, and so forth—are seen as permanent and unchangeable, impervious to challenge by the working class or by anybody else. On one level, this was simply a reformulation of Marx’s famous dictum that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”99 Nonetheless, Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony represented a significant innovation in Marxist theory, because it provided a basis for understanding the continued survival of capitalism while simultaneously opening a path to its overthrow. If bourgeois hegemony could be challenged, then the willingness of workers to accept partial concessions would give way to a generalized revolutionary consciousness and struggle. For Hamerquist, hegemony helped describe the contradictory experience of working-class life in the United States, which he reformulated as “dual consciousness.”100 According to this framework, “The working class as it exists under capitalism has two conceptions of the world. One is essentially capitalist. It accepts private property as necessary; sees competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and selfishness as basic characteristics of ‘human nature’; and does not challenge the notions of right, justice, and freedom which serve to maintain the dominance of the capitalist class.”101 In contrast, proletarian consciousness presaged the potential for a new organization of society, communism. According to Toward a Revolutionary Party, one of STO’s earliest pamphlets, “The second factor determining the content of working-class ideology is the potential of that class to become a ruling class. This potential is manifested in, and demonstrated by, ideas and actions which run counter to the capitalist conception of the world. As has been said, these ideas and actions become mass phenomena during periods of sharp struggle...often being articulated as the explicit basis of the struggle.”102 Hamerquist maintained that this process was possible only in and through the collective actions of the working class itself: in particular, moments of intense class struggle at the point of production can help accelerate the process of replacing bourgeois with proletarian consciousness.

According to STO, bourgeois consciousness in North America was manifested in a variety of ways, including the limits placed on radical organizing by the commitment to trade unions and to general notions of legality. However, the most important example of bourgeois consciousness was white supremacy, and in particular the attachment of white workers to the privileges of white skin. This issue will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three, but for now it is important to note that STO identified white skin privilege as symptomatic and exemplary of a broader obstacle to revolution, not simply as an isolated question of racist ideas. Similarly, white supremacy was never viewed as primarily an issue of attitudes and opinions, because Marxism maintained that consciousness was the result of material conditions. The group argued strongly for the position that white supremacy had a material basis in the development of capitalism in North America, and regularly reprinted the writings on this topic by Ted Allen (who was never himself a member of STO).103

This conception of consciousness and the revolutionary potential of the working class was unusual, to say the least, within the developing New Communist Movement of the early seventies. Most other groups involved in point-of-production work, whether based in the Trotskyist or Maoist traditions, maintained the traditional position associated with Lenin’s well-known tract What is to be Done?: workers themselves can only obtain the sort of “trade union consciousness” that leads them to accept partial concessions from management in a permanently reformist cycle. Thus, the class will remain divided and ineffectual until the intervention of organized, conscious revolutionaries transforms the perspective of the workers from the outside, creating the “revolutionary consciousness” that is necessary for the overthrow of capitalism.104 This line of thinking led to the creation of multiple self-appointed vanguard parties throughout the seventies, including the Revolutionary Communist Party (previously the Revolutionary Union, or RU) and the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (initially the October League, or OL). Both of these organizations at their respective heights were far larger than STO, each including hundreds of members spread across the country, and depending upon one’s perspective, could be viewed as having been more “successful” in their workplace interventions. But their theoretical approach was never the only one available.

Hamerquist was a committed Leninist and certainly did not reject the importance of organized revolutionaries—or else he would never have participated in STO—but he believed that Lenin’s original analysis of consciousness had been transformed by the experiences of 1905 and 1917.105 In the context of radical agitation within the working class, STO’s Toward a Revolutionary Party argues that “The connection between mass struggle and socialism must be organic and political, not a mechanical or literary gimmick like making the last demand on every program a demand for socialism. Unless socialist agitation and propaganda can be linked to the learning context of the mass struggle, it will amount, at best, to lecturing the workers on issues which their own experiences have not yet made real, and it will not take root.”106 In striking a necessary balance between mass struggles and small group revolutionary organizing, STO tended to emphasize the former, while its larger competitor organizations prioritized the latter.

One corollary to this contrast was that where other left groups focused first on the development of theory and political line, which could then be implemented in practical ways, STO looked first to the realm of practice as the place where provisional theories could be put to the test and evaluated. This difference should not be overstated, since all Marxist groups recognized the need to integrate both theory and practice in their efforts. Nonetheless, the distinctiveness of the STO approach is reflected in an assessment of the group’s incredible breadth of actual organizing experiences during the first half of the seventies.

* * *

The guiding principle of STO’s attempts at workplace organizing was the rejection of trade unions as the vehicle for their efforts. Following the What is to be Done? strategy, most other left groups of the era (especially the OL, as well as several Trotskyist organizations) emphasized the creation of opposition caucuses that could eventually take over the unions and turn them into fighting organizations of the working class. But for STO, the very concept of “trade union consciousness,” combined with the Italian and Detroit experiences, as well as the overall arc of organized labor’s increasingly corrupt history in the twentieth century, implied profound limits to the radical potential of the unions.107 In this context, the classic experiences of the Industrial Workers of the World, from its inception in 1905 to its decline in the mid-twenties, provided an example of the alternative to the AFL-CIO. STO referred to this alternative as “independent mass workers’ organizations,” which more or less paralleled the Wobbly concept of “one big union.” In its prime, the IWW had organized thousands of workplaces, led hundreds of strike actions, and throughout had shown complete disregard for bourgeois niceties like legality, reasonableness, and respectability.108 The Wobblies reflected and crystallized the revolutionary aspirations of a vast cross section of semiskilled and unskilled industrial workers all across the United States. Beginning with Chicago more than half a century later, STO optimistically hoped to accomplish something similar.

In the early months of 1970, the influence of the IWW could be seen not only in the text of STO’s first official publication, “A Call to Organize,” which quoted the preamble to the IWW constitution, but also in two abortive efforts made by STO to intervene in industrial contexts. First, Noel Ignatin drafted a constitution he hoped would be adopted by a Chicago-wide federation of such independent organizations, “based on the expectation that it would shortly have chapters in all the major plants in Chicago and be widely recognized as a major force in industry. Fortunately,” Ignatin noted sardonically in 1980, “that document has been lost.”109 Second, Hamerquist wrote a call for a Chicago-wide, all-industry general strike to be held on May Day, 1970, taking a page directly from the IWW playbook of six decades previous.110 Needless to say, the strike did not come off as planned. Beyond demonstrating STO’s initial naïveté concerning the immediate prospects for industrial organizing and revolution, these first efforts also clearly outline the group’s refusal to work within the established trade unions. While subsequent organizing work was less grandiose, it was no less confrontational.

For the most part, STO’s strategy took one of two approaches: either the group provided support to independent organizations as they developed in workplaces like Western Electric, or members of STO took jobs in specifically targeted factories and attempted to organize independent organizations directly, with and alongside other militant coworkers. The flagship factory for this sort of industrial concentration was the Stewart-Warner facility on the north side of Chicago, although similar efforts were made at Motorola, at the International Harvester Plant in Melrose Park (once the Chicago plant had closed), and in the steel mills of South Chicago and northwestern Indiana. In the early years, the organization was structured into multiple branches, and for a time each branch was associated with a major factory concentration, although in no case did every member of a branch work in the target plant.111 In each instance, however, several STO members obtained work in each factory and set about organizing rank and file groups that always included nonmembers as well.

The first part of building an industrial concentration was obtaining employment in the chosen factories. This was not always easy, especially for middle-class radicals with years of university experience in their recent past. Lies had to be told, job applications had to be fudged, and eyebrow-raising aspects of personal histories had to be rewritten for the benefit of hiring agents. When John Strucker, for example, applied for work at the Stewart-Warner factory, he needed to explain away the seven years he had spent pursuing his undergraduate and masters degrees full time. He concocted an elaborate tale, wherein he had completed high school but then had been obligated to take over the family hardware store in New Jersey when his father became ill. Being good with his hands but not much as a manager, the store had struggled for several years and eventually went under, after which he had headed to Chicago in search of factory jobs. This story was good enough to get him work as a lathe operator, a position he held for more than a decade. Early on, however, he was identified as a trouble-maker, and the company eventually researched his back story. Once they determined that no such hardware store had ever existed, management attempted to fire him. With help from STO’s contingent of lawyers, Strucker appealed his case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Upon consideration, the NLRB ruled in his favor, noting that although he had in fact lied on his job application, he had lied “down,” underplaying his credentials rather than overstating them.112

In the early seventies, the Stewart-Warner factory employed several thousand people, more or less evenly split between black, white, and latino (largely Puerto Rican) workers, of whom perhaps one half were women.113 The plant manufactured a variety of electrical components for use in cars, boats, and other vehicles. It had a range of military contracts that were lost in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.114 As many as a dozen STO members had jobs in various departments, and were thus able to slowly build a factory-wide presence for the group’s politics. (Many other radical groups also sent members to work at the plant, resulting in something of a hot-house for testing competing approaches.) The first step was the initiation of a shop newsletter called Talk Back, which was published at least occasionally for close to a decade, well after the last STO members still working at Stewart-Warner left the organization (but not the factory) in 1978. Initially, Talk Back was published and distributed anonymously to prevent the company from punishing those responsible. As time went on, however, the members began to publicly distribute the newsletter as a way to build solidarity within the factory. In addition, STO members also produced and distributed a range of stickers in and around the factory, which were used as propaganda and as morale boosters.

This initial phase of propaganda and semi-anonymous agitation was paralleled in all the plants where STO had a physical presence. Newsletters called Workers’ Voice were published and distributed at Melrose Park and at Motorola, where the name was later changed to Breakout!, and similar efforts were made elsewhere.115 All these publications shared a common approach, using to-the-point arguments and avoiding obscure political jargon, while stoking controversy whenever possible. Issues specific to particular departments were given as much coverage as plant-wide problems, in an attempt to broaden worker interest and solidarity. Particularly corrupt union officials and especially hated foremen and managers were routinely criticized, insulted, and mocked by name. Instances of collective worker action, be they spontaneous or well planned, were reported as models to emulate. But STO understood that the goal of publishing such shop sheets went beyond simply providing information to workers. Hamerquist worked at Stewart-Warner when Talk Back was first initiated, and in an early analysis of the group’s workplace efforts, he argued that “Since the function of leaflets and newsletters is not just general education or agitation, but to help create a base of independent organization, they must aim toward mobilizing the workers for certain specific struggles. It can easily happen that the literature can make threats, pledges, and calls to action that it can’t back up with a base of real strength. This hurts. When something is put on paper, the authors are committed to it; and if they can’t deliver, the credibility of their organizing work is damaged.”116

Recognizing this relationship between publications and organizing, an outside phone number or address was often included in the shop sheets, in an effort to include other interested workers. In most cases the newsletters either started out as or eventually became collaborative efforts rather than purely STO projects. This interactive aspect also allowed some of the publications to become limited forums for political debate, as when Talk Back printed a series of exchanges with a militant but racist worker who sent in letters criticizing working conditions in her or his department while also castigating Puerto Ricans for supposedly being lazy.117 This provided the STO members and editors of the newsletter an opportunity to challenge the white supremacy that characterized even more militant white workers.

Another aspect of STO’s approach to propaganda was the production of an agitational newspaper for mass distribution. Beginning in late 1970 with a single issue of Bread and Roses, a paper aimed specifically at working-class women, the organization consistently (if irregularly) distributed such newspapers to workers across the Chicago area until at least 1974. Bread and Roses depicted the struggles of working mothers, reported on labor struggles at a variety of hospitals, analyzed the causes of inflation, retold the history of the IWW-led textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 that popularized the demand for “bread and roses,” and criticized mainstream labor unions as unresponsive to the needs of women workers. In an editorial statement, the group popularized its views on unions and on white supremacy: “If we are ever going to get anywhere, white women must support the struggles of black and Latin workers for an end to racism and for equality. We cannot rely on the existing unions to fight for us. The unions do nothing for women workers. They are content to let us work for slave wages. They don’t care if we are excluded from the better jobs. They don’t even fight for our job security.”118 The paper also contained a four-page section in Spanish. Apart from the exclusive emphasis on women workers, Bread and Roses set the pattern for most of the agitational publications put out under STO’s name over the next several years.

The group’s next agitational paper was the Insurgent Worker, which was published regularly as a tabloid-size paper in 1971 and 1972, and sporadically in magazine size during the next two years. During 1973, STO members in Gary published the smaller and more Indiana-focused Calumet Insurgent Worker, which primarily covered news from the steel mills as well as other workplaces in Gary and the surrounding area. All these papers featured news STO considered to be of interest to working-class people, including updates on rank-and-file struggles at factories across the United States and abroad, advice on dealing with the legal aspects of on-the-job conflicts such as National Labor Relations Board hearings and unemployment claims, and analysis of major news stories like the wage and price controls instituted by Nixon in 1971, the prison uprising at Attica, and the course of the war in Vietnam.119

The distribution of shop sheets and agitational newspapers was a common tactic for seventies leftists involved in workplace organizing, and there is no evidence that STO was any more successful than, for example, the October League, either at integrating workers into their papers’ preparation or at tying them to specific struggles. The distinctiveness of STO’s approach to the workplace became more clear when, building upon the initial work of producing shop sheets, in-plant efforts graduated to supporting and even initiating organizing efforts within the factory.120 These campaigns ran the gamut from small-scale attempts to remove particularly mean-spirited or racist foremen to plant-wide struggles around improving working conditions and health and safety precautions. Three elements helped clarify the differences between STO’s efforts and those of the OL, the RU, and other groups involved in factory work.

First, one common example of left work in factories was missing from the STO approach: attempts to change the union leadership. In contrast to other left groups that focused their efforts on developing oppositional caucuses that could challenge corrupt union bureaucrats, STO argued that the institution of the trade union was itself the problem, and that changing the names on the leadership slate would, at best, have no effect, or, at worst, make workers even more complacent than they had previously been. At Stewart-Warner, for example, Talk Back mocked the inner-union caucus efforts by promoting a garbage can, “Filthy Billy” Trash, as a “CANdidate” for president of the local.121

This abstention, which was criticized by skeptics both inside and outside STO, extended even to the level of departmental steward, which represented to many leftists both a winnable and a meaningful position in the union hierarchy. Stewards have responsibility for pursuing worker grievances, and the choice between a responsive steward and a corrupt one can make the difference between success and failure in any number of meaningful on-the-job crises. Nonetheless, STO’s critical perspective on trade unions led the group to decide that no STO member could run for steward, although members did sometimes support, and shop sheets periodically reported on, the candidacies of militant coworkers.122 As we shall see, this position did not go unchallenged within the group as the seventies progressed.

Of course, not all workplaces were unionized. In nonunion plants, a different set of problems presented themselves, but the contrast between STO and other left groups attempting to organize workers remained. At the Motorola factory on the west side of Chicago, for example, STO members were involved in the creation of the Motorola Organizing Committee and the publication of the newsletter Breakout! For a group like the International Socialists this might have been a prelude to an organizing drive to bring in a progressive but mainstream union and demand a first contract. But even after several years of activity in the plant, the editors of Breakout! could write: “We do not work for any union. We are not against unions, but mostly we are for people fighting the company.”123 Just as in unionized factories, the STO members at Motorola didn’t think unions were a productive way to fight the company, so they never attempted to bring one in.

Another major difference between STO’s approach and that of other left groups committed to industrial concentration related to the kinds of demands that were put forward in organizing projects. Many left groups pushed campaigns that promised to improve working conditions for all workers equally, such as across-the-board pay raises, in a version of the argument that a rising tide lifts all boats. STO members, by contrast, involved themselves first and foremost in struggles to improve the situations of the most oppressed workers, typically minorities and women. For example, the Talk Back group helped coordinate an eventually successful campaign at Stewart-Warner to eliminate a particular pay grade that was being used by the management as an excuse to pay black and Puerto Rican women significantly less than white women for similar work.124 Organizing workers around this demand meant convincing the majority of the workers—all men and white women—to back a demand that had no immediate effect on their working conditions. The arguments advanced by STO members and their allies in campaigns like this were both moral and strategic, and, win or lose, they helped define the approach taken by STO to workplace organizing.

The third key difference between STO’s work in factories and that of other left groups concerned recruitment. All Leninist organizations agreed on the need to create a new and truly revolutionary party that could serve as the vanguard of all struggles against capitalism; this included STO, which had made party-building a part of its initial self-conception as far back as 1969. Further, all these groups recognized that any such party needed to be demographically representative of the working class it claimed to represent. For the OL, the RU, and most other New Communist groups, this implied a significant emphasis on recruitment of workers, and especially nonwhite workers, to their organizations. For STO, however, the defense of workers’ autonomy implied in the critical view of the trade unions meant that the involvement of workers in independent organizations in the workplace was not normally a first step toward recruitment into the group, but first and foremost a way to build the experience and self-confidence of workers. Further, the analysis of white supremacy and white skin privilege led STO to be even more leery of attempts to recruit workers of color (or “third world workers” as they were commonly known in the seventies).125 In the end, few people joined STO directly from the shop-floor, and of those who did, almost none maintained their membership for longer than a year or two.126 On the whole, STO was less interested in recruitment than in supporting the autonomy of the working class. Thus, the group attempted to intervene in struggles that it believed might eventually result in the creation of a revolutionary party in the United States, but it did not generally consider itself the organizational kernel around which that party would develop.

* * *

This emphasis on autonomy was also reflected clearly in the effort the Sojourner Truth Organization put into supporting independent rank-and-file struggles in workplaces where the group had no physical presence, like the cable plant at the Western Electric factory in Cicero. STO intervened, in its unique fashion, in dozens of such workplace campaigns, attempting in every case to aid in the creation of the same independent mass workers’ organizations that were mentioned previously. In addition to the twister department experience, two other examples provide substantial insight into the successes and failures of the organization’s approach: the Gateway struggle and the nationwide independent truckers’ strike of 1974.

Gateway Industries ran a small factory on the southeast side of Chicago that for unknown reasons manufactured the odd pairing of dishwasher detergent and seatbelts.127 In many ways, the plant was the opposite of a factory like Stewart-Warner: it was small (seven hundred employees at most), it had never been unionized, the workers were almost entirely immigrant women from Mexico, and STO had no physical presence in the plant at any time. STO members who operated a Workers’ Rights Center in the neighborhood made initial contact with disgruntled former workers at the plant. The Center was primarily a legal clinic where workers from the surrounding community could get free advice from sympathetic lawyers and paralegals, who were members of STO. Among other programs, volunteers at the Workers’ Rights Center helped people who had recently been laid off apply for unemployment benefits. In this process, STO members encountered a number of Mexican women who had been put out of work when the Gateway factory closed its doors in preparation for a move to Mexico. Then-member Beth Henson was their primary contact at the Center, and she recalls their anger about the situation:

Estela, a formidable woman in her forties, who had worked there for over a decade, told me how management had brought in new machines a year before shutting down in Chicago. “We taught them how to run those machines; they didn’t teach us. They sent us their so-called experts but their experts didn’t know how to run production, we knew how to run production. We were the ones who were there every day, not them. They were in the front office, drinking coffee. We showed them how to do it and then they took it away and went to teach it to someone else. They left us here with nothing, after we showed them how.”128

With a little prompting from STO, the women decided to fight the plant closure. They called a demonstration and distributed leaflets (again, written by the workers and printed by STO), which succeeded in getting the attention of Gateway’s management. The personnel officer contacted the Workers’ Rights Center and agreed to meet with Kingsley Clarke, the main attorney at the Center, to discuss the situation. Clarke was also a member of STO, and with his help Henson was able to gather the women for a sneak attack: when the Gateway manager arrived for his one-on-one, fifty angry, out-of-work women came in through the side door and cornered him. Under pressure, he offered the women jobs at a new factory Gateway was about to open. The new plant was an hour’s drive away, but as Henson remembers, “Kingsley and I thought it was a good offer and a kind of victory, but after some heated discussion, in a mixture of English and Spanish, the women refused. They even went so far as to tear up the contract we had drawn up.”129

Was this refusal a victory or a defeat? This vexing question can be asked about almost all the workplace efforts STO undertook. In this case, the women remained without work, and even their sense of collective power was short-lived. But, to quote Henson again,

I’d seen a glimpse of a new world in the way they gathered themselves together and cohered, with their affectionate teasing and the way they made room for one another, the way they surmounted their condition as wives and mothers, leaving their families to fend for themselves (the table set, dinner in the oven). One of them had been so resistant to her husband’s demand that she stay at home that the battle escalated into a petition for divorce. They became actors in the drama, lifted out of the daily routine. The struggle gave them a glimpse of power, a crack in a world whose order could be overturned. They had recognized again the way the company had exploited them, finally replacing them as if they were interchangeable units, and they had regained, too, their unity, discipline, and organization, brought about by the same common experience. I had never seen anything like it; it was a living demonstration of the development of the proletariat into a class. Our intervention had been incidental; we had provided only the frame and the occasion.130

Another such living demonstration was provided by a very different set of workers, the independent, owner-operator long-distance truck drivers, who went out on a several-day-long wildcat strike at the end of January and beginning of February 1974. The truckers were almost entirely white men, and in contrast to the women of Gateway, they each, theoretically, owned their own small businesses in the form of their cabs. Nonetheless, STO saw in the truckers’ strike a kernel of working-class autonomy and power that was not so dissimilar to that glimpsed by Henson in the context of the Gateway struggle.

By early 1974, inflation in the US was rapidly driving up the prices of a range of basic necessities, including food, utilities, and fuel.131 The last of these, the price of gas, was forced even higher by the Middle East conflict and the energy crisis of 1973. For owner-operator long-distance truckers, a small change in the price per gallon of diesel fuel made the difference between a comfortable profit and the threat of bankruptcy. In this context, a number of independent truckers’ organizations sprang up and demanded an immediate reduction in fuel prices. It may seem odd now that a price reduction could even be a negotiable demand, but in 1974 Nixon’s wage and price controls were a recent memory, so it did not seem impossible that the federal government would comply, if enough pressure was brought to bear. Pressure arrived on January 31, in the form of a nationwide shut down in long-distance trucking; across the country, truck stops filled up and didn’t empty out as drivers stopped their rigs wherever they happened to be on the chosen day.

Gary, Indiana was home to a major truck stop, and STO took full advantage of this proximity. In addition to the members of the organization who already lived in Gary, at least two Chicago-based STO members temporarily moved to the truck stop itself to work directly with the strikers. Predictably, one of the group’s first actions was to help the truckers design a poster, which was then printed on STO’s press. The poster showed a photo of an actual striker’s truck in the Gary truck stop, with a sign in the driver’s side window that read “Shut down or shut up! Jan. 31st until …”132 Around the photo were printed the words “Simon says … ‘Get ’em rolling!’ Truckers say … Hell NO!!” At the time, William Simon was the Federal Energy Czar and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and he designed the government’s response to the strike, which was to order the truckers back on the road, but allow them to charge their customers more in order to offset the high diesel prices.133 Many of the strikers opposed this because it would contribute to inflation and hurt working people across the board, whereas a reduction in the price of diesel would only inconvenience the oil companies. The “Simon Says” poster was distributed not only at the truck stop, but also to workers across Chicago, wherever STO had contacts. Talk Back also published a piece in late February entitled “TB Supports Truckers,” as a way of continuing the discussion among Stewart-Warner workers even after the strike had ended.134

In addition to printing the poster, STO members offered the truckers technical assistance on organizing meetings, and helped them make contact with women living in Gary whose husbands, brothers, or sons were truckers who had shut down in other parts of the country. As Carole Travis remembers, “We were trying to extend their own sense of their own power, and give them tools to extend it. That’s why we helped them come up with the idea of going to the community and using the radio to get women to come out who were from the area … even though maybe their husbands were in Missouri.”135 As the strike continued, pressure built on the truckers, both from the government—who had called out the National Guard in some states after strikers were accused of assaulting scab truckers who were still on the highways—and from families who were under greater economic strain the longer their husbands and fathers were away from home. In this context, STO members attempted to paint a bigger picture for the strikers, so that they could see the broader implications of their action. “So we would talk with them,” recalls Travis, “‘What are you doing? What do you hope for?’” These conversations had at least as much impact on STO as they did on the truckers themselves. Three decades later, according to Travis, “It’s hard to really even remember in some ways, but we felt like we were connected—and we were connected—to some workers who were spontaneously taking on the power structure, and acting … It was wonderful.”

STO was quite possibly the only left group in the United States to take the truckers’ strike seriously. For most other Marxists, the truckers weren’t of interest, largely because in traditional Marxist terms they weren’t part of the working class. Further, even if they were included in the proletariat, as white men they reflected a highly privileged stratum of the working class. None of this kept STO from recognizing the incredible potential of independent organization in the transportation industry. The strike dramatically impeded the normal operation of capitalism, with both factories and stores feeling the shortage of goods that were sitting idle in truck stops across the country. Several major auto plants shut down temporarily, as did a number of coal mines. In addition, the truckers’ status as owner-operators meant that they couldn’t establish a trade union, even if they wanted to, while STO’s alternative model of independent mass workers’ organizations was spontaneously being implemented. The need for the National Guard highlighted the fact that the truckers made direct action a central part of the strike, even going so far as to dynamite a bridge in Pennsylvania.136 In the end, however, the strike was lost, as one-by-one the truck stops emptied and rigs returned to the road. A handful of strike attempts were made in the ensuing years, but none was anywhere near as successful in shutting down interstate transit.

* * *

It was no accident that STO was well-positioned to support striking truckers camped out in Gary, Indiana. From the beginning, STO’s geographic base of operations was deliberately limited to the Chicago metropolitan area. Nonetheless, from early on the group placed a priority on expanding its mass work to other regions whenever this was feasible. An early effort in this direction was the decision to send members to Gary, where they were to seek work in the steel industry. This was initially conceived as part of an attempt to build a working relationship with the Black Workers’ Congress (BWC), one of the successor organizations to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers from Detroit. The League split in 1971, drawn apart by a combination of personal conflicts and political differences over the proper direction for the group. The Black Workers’ Congress faction was interested in using the workplace organizing model pioneered by DRUM as a basis for radical activity across the country.137 The first venue for this effort was the steel industry in Gary, Indiana, which resembled Detroit insofar as it was heavily industrialized and heavily black. Sensing an opportunity to build meaningful connections based on a shared interest in point-of-production organizing and an opposition to white supremacy, Noel Ignatin and several other members of STO moved to Gary.138 While the BWC project barely got off the ground before the group changed direction yet again—this time toward party-building efforts at the expense of mass work—STO maintained a modest presence in the steel mills for the next several years.

Once the steel connection had been established, STO looked to expand its horizons further by publishing a special edition of the Insurgent Worker that focused entirely on the steel industry. This one-off project was a collaboration between STO and like-minded comrades in the steel mills of Detroit and Buffalo.139 In a parallel vein, the group published a series of pamphlets over the course of 1972 that were intended for national distribution. Some of them, like the criticism of the Revolutionary Union’s attempts (along with the now party-oriented Black Workers’ Congress) to build a “United Front Against Imperialism,” were aimed at a narrow left audience.140 Others, however, were pitched as how-to manuals on a variety of topics, and were somewhat more broadly applicable. One of these was a pamphlet entitled Organizing Working Class Women, which argued that women occupied key roles in the struggle against capitalism, even while it recognized that most women did not work in heavy industry.141 This pamphlet was part of a continuing emphasis STO placed on women’s issues, although it clearly positioned itself within the framework established by the feminist radicals. One of the pamphlet’s major contentions is that “working women’s power lies with their class, with the growth of working-class consciousness, and the development of concrete challenges to bourgeois society and bourgeois ideas. Through the development of dual power organizations of workers, proletarian women can identify where their power lies as a class, even though they may not be directly involved in production.”142

Although the immediate effects of such efforts to project STO politics on a national scale were limited, the idea of intervening in a small way in mass struggles outside the Chicago area remained central to the group’s strategy for the rest of its existence, even after workplace organizing had ceased to be a priority. A much more complicated attempt to implement STO’s approach to point-of-production work arose in the form of the Farah Strike in El Paso, Texas. Four thousand garment workers at the Farah Manufacturing Company were on strike for almost two years, from May of 1972 until March of 1974, initially because several workers had been fired for attending a pro-union rally.143 What began as a local labor dispute quickly became a nationwide fixation for labor and left movements, partly because Farah-brand blue jeans were sold across the country, but also because the workforce was overwhelmingly Mexican-American, and overwhelmingly female.

Like most other New Communist Movement organizations, not to mention the mainstream labor movement, STO took an immediate interest in the strike. The group organized fundraising events as a way to educate and involve factory workers in Chicago, and many of the shop sheets reported sympathetically on the women’s struggles. In addition, however, STO took the extra step of sending people to El Paso, first on an investigative trip and later on a long-term assignment to work directly with the strikers.144 At the time, STO included a number of native Spanish speakers, and at least two of them spent much of 1973 living in El Paso, providing direct assistance to the strikers.145 While other left groups may have sent similar delegations, STO’s unique politics around trade unions ensured that its approach was distinctive. From early on, the garment workers had been officially members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), but as usual STO encouraged the women not to place their trust in the union. For a brief period the prospects for collaboration seemed good, but internal problems in Chicago contributed to a sluggish response. A small number of members, including those who traveled to El Paso, were inspired by the possibilities of the struggle, but the majority of the membership was unfamiliar with the issues and apparently unwilling to be distracted from their own immediate organizing responsibilities in order to focus on a campaign taking place a thousand miles away.146 As a result, the Farah strike remained on the back burner for the organization as a whole, and in the end the women put their faith in the ACWA rather than in STO.

* * *

Another problem area for the Sojourner Truth Organization during its workplace period was the cultural realm. Certainly, the group understood on a basic level the importance of popular culture as a motivating force in people’s lives, but STO was for the most part unable to harness its power. Several former members recall a certain woodenness to the group’s cultural work. Events planned for after-work hours tended to be educationals or fundraisers (on Farah, for example, or other important struggles from across the country), rather than simply arenas for the building of affinity and solidarity among workers. Former member Guillermo Brzotowski remembers a handful of dance parties that brought together workers from several of the factories where STO had a presence, but this was clearly the exception rather than the rule.147 The fact that most early STO members did not themselves have children may have contributed to a blind spot in the organization around the concept of the working-class family.148 Partly as a result, the group’s members shared with many other New Communist groups a single-mindedness as organizers and political militants that partially alienated them from their target audience of coworkers, who were often impressed with their dedication but in most circumstances were unwilling to replicate it.

The root of much of this disconnection was probably the class division between STO members, who were generally university-educated and in many cases from bourgeois backgrounds, and their coworkers at factories like Stewart-Warner. One former member describes himself and his then-comrades as having no sense of “the richness of working-class life.”149 In reaction, many members of the group attempted to adopt certain cultural forms that they identified as appropriate to the working class, such as musical interests. Long-time member John Strucker maintains that “most of the time I was in STO, we were way into whatever music the working-class people we were with, liked. And, basically, Chicago being Chicago, that meant soul and blues on the one hand, and country and western on the other.”150 Similarly, Kingsley Clarke remembers “a certain shit-kicking Johnny Cash-like culture,” that he encountered early on: “my first exposure to STO was in Gary, and on the second day they invited me to eat breakfast, and they were drinking whiskey for breakfast. And I think that was a bit of a posture.”151

For some members, the posture transformed into a more developed political stance. One tendency within STO was labeled “workerist” because of the emphasis placed on integrating as fully as possible with the working class. In many cases, this manifested itself in the adoption of common working-class attitudes, including eventually a willingness to work with the trade unions. Noel Ignatiev recalls “the people who really dug in, got a house and wife and kids in Gary … some are probably retired by now, if they didn’t destroy their lungs.”152 From the perspective of those who remained in STO for the long-haul, these people were inevitably lost to the struggle, as they made their peace with the unions, and with the day-to-day realities of working-class life. On the other hand, the workerist attitude was an important corrective to the woodenness or posturing that characterized much of STO’s early work. In the end, a split in the organization over these issues would mark the conclusion of STO’s initial workplace period.

* * *

Internal disagreements over workerism were just one example of the dynamic evolution of STO’s perspective on workplace organizing: it was never static, and was in fact subject to regular evaluation, challenge, and reformulation within the group. STO’s first formal publication was “A Call to Organize,” which was drafted by Ignatin and Hamerquist in early 1970. This leaflet summarizes the initial approach taken by STO, as well as the optimism that characterized its earliest work. The text was subsequently revised and expanded as a pamphlet called Mass Organization in the Workplace, which was reprinted multiple times. As early as the beginning of 1972, however, it included a prefatory note to the effect that it was “not a full and accurate picture of the production organizing perspective of the Sojourner Truth Organization.”153 This cautionary note exemplified the group’s constant attempts to improve on its prior theory in the light of accumulated experience.

By the same token, STO’s internal discussions of the appropriate trajectory for workplace interventions were quite sophisticated, and often quite heated. In the fall of 1970, STO held its first evaluation-of-work meeting. Don Hamerquist presented a paper entitled “Reflections on Organizing,” which articulated some necessary corrections to the group’s initial conception.154 In Hamerquist’s view, STO’s first efforts had been characterized by a simplistic understanding of the class forces involved in workplace organizing, as well as a naïve understanding of the risks and benefits of direct action at the job site. For instance, he challenges the notion that younger workers, black and latino workers, and established rank-and-file militants shared a common openness to revolutionary ideas. Instead,

The initial cadre of workers [within an independent organization] must have a number of different characteristics which show up among different social groups in the factory. It must be open to a general revolutionary critique of capitalism; it must be aware of the importance of organization; it must be able to provide leadership for the struggles that develop on the job. Workers radicalized outside of the job [e.g. black and latino workers and younger, counter-cultural whites] are more likely to accept a radical critique than they are to see the possibility and necessity of building mass struggle and organization. The trade union opposition might want to get organized and even accept a few revolutionary propositions, but they won’t see why this should go beyond a struggle for control of the union. The leader of job actions is likely to be great whenever a spontaneous struggle arises, but to have no idea of what to do in other situations or how to relate job issues to general political issues. Each of these limitations in areas of possible support for our perspective help spell out the sort of political problems that are involved in implementing it.155

Similarly, just as different sorts of workers exhibited different potentials, so too did different sorts of job actions. In this case, however, a single type of action, such as a strike, could take on completely different meanings depending upon its character. Thus, “some strikes involve mass participation in struggle, but most clearly do not. No alternative conception of the world is manifested in those strikes where the union and management cooperate in the orderly closure of operations; where picketing is only a dull and tiring public-relations chore; and where the bulk of workers just disappear till a new contract is signed. And this is the character of most present-day strikes.”156 The alternative to this dismal outlook was direct action at the job site. But one universal difficulty of implementing STO’s perspective was the tension between the need for direct action, and the risk of job loss or even criminal prosecution. This tension was paralleled by a similar conflict between the requirement that independent organizations be mass in character and the necessity that they be politically cohesive. The terrain on which these contradictions played themselves out was the question of openness and secrecy. In Hamerquist’s view, “though the difficulties in functioning openly are certainly real, there is no alternative to using whatever possibilities exist and working to expand these possibilities as rapidly as possible. This follows from the absolutely essential role of direct action.… There is no way that direct action can be developed if a conspiratorial cadre grouping becomes a substitute for, rather than a means to, a mass organization.”157 Building on these reflections, and on the concrete experiences of members, the group progressively shifted its emphasis toward greater openness on the shop floor. In 1973, in particular, the organization prioritized mass work to the exclusion of most other concerns, including the internal functioning of the group as a whole, which suffered as a result.

* * *

Once this transition was underway, conflicts arose within STO around the implications of mass organizing. While the majority of members, including both the formal and informal leadership, stood firm in opposition to participating in intra-union reform efforts, a growing minority began to question the logic of this position. The disagreement manifested itself in the form of a debate over the right of members to run for shop steward. As indicated above, stewards were the lowest rung of the union bureaucracy, and in many cases replacing a bad steward with a good one led directly to improvements in working conditions as well as organizing prospects. In fact, more than a few STO members in multiple factories were asked by their rank-and-file workmates to run for steward, most often against particularly hated union hacks. In most cases, these members refused, citing an organizational policy that was often difficult for their coworkers to fathom. This process could be frustrating for all involved, although in many situations compromises could be arrived at, where non-STO militants ran for steward instead.

The frustration was perhaps most intense in the Westside STO branch, which was concentrated around the International Harvester plant in Melrose Park. In contrast to the undeniably corrupt IBEW local that controlled Stewart-Warner, a somewhat more progressive faction of the United Auto Workers was in charge at Melrose. Further, the radical origins of the UAW and its liberal reputation throughout the sixties and early seventies encouraged the STO members employed by International Harvester to pursue some tentative engagement with the union.158 The branch established a Workers’ Voice Committee, which straddled the line between being an independent organization and functioning as a dissident union caucus.159 Michael Goldfield, who had helped found STO and was one of its most experienced workplace organizers, was drawn to the possibility of becoming a departmental steward; both his coworkers and his branch mates supported him, while other STO members were harshly critical. As early as the fall of 1972, such criticisms led Goldfield and his supporters to feel as if they were being marginalized within the organization.160

By late 1973, conflict came to a head at the meeting where members reviewed the previous year’s work, which was held over Thanksgiving weekend at a retreat center in Michigan. In advance of the meeting, Goldfield and another STO member named Mel Rothenberg drafted a paper entitled “The Crisis in STO,” which was subsequently signed by seven additional members of the group, including the entire Westside branch. In many ways, this document skirts the trade union issue, preferring instead to argue its points on the plane of STO’s party-building efforts and the question of correct interpretations of Leninism (these issues will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter Four). However, the early sections of the piece contain an assessment of the organization’s mass work, including thinly veiled criticisms of the extra-union orientation that guided STO’s approach to workplace struggles. “The Crisis” begins by asking a number of critical questions about difficulties that the Westside branch had encountered in organizing at the International Harvester plant: “Why has so much direct action at Melrose not contributed towards the development of a growing, stable, independent organization?… Why have we been unable to build a sustained, coherent, credible alternative to trade unionist forms of struggle?”161

In answering these questions, the paper identifies two factions of the organization that, while superficially opposed to each other, formed a unified obstacle to STO’s success in the workplace. The authors label these factions the “workerist tendency” and the “bureaucratic tendency.” The former is consistent with the earlier description of total immersion in mass work and an attempt at complete integration with the working class. The latter represents an approach that prioritized organizational growth and structure above mass work. According to “The Crisis,” “these two antagonistic tendencies can co-exist and complement each other, not only in the organization, but at various times in the minds of the same individuals.”162 In contrast, the signers of “The Crisis” position themselves as a faction advancing the Maoist position of “politics in command,” within which the theoretical line would determine everything. This they opposed to the “technique in command” stance supposedly shared by the workerists and the bureaucrats, all of whom, according to “The Crisis,” emphasized a mechanistic devotion to tactics instead of theory.163

According to the paper, the roots of STO’s crisis were to be found in the theoretical incoherence of the group’s line on class consciousness, as expressed primarily in Toward a Revolutionary Party. The idea of “leading workers into an organizational form where they can ‘experience’ socialism in action,” as implied by Hamerquist’s dual consciousness theory, “shows a contempt for workers’ immediate interests, refuses to rely on workers’ ability to think and develop politically, and poses a behavioristic shortcut to class consciousness.”164 The question of a “shortcut” is key: dual consciousness theory ignores the necessary developmental process by which workers internalize the transformative vision put forward by conscious revolutionaries. By contrast, “The Crisis” advocates a return to the more traditionally Leninist theory of trade-union and revolutionary consciousness, which not coincidentally offered greater latitude to those interested in union reform efforts. In a follow-up paper with the telling title “The Role of a Proletarian Party in the Development of Mass Socialist Consciousness,” this contrast is clarified:

The difference between Lenin’s conception of the development of socialist consciousness and the view put forth by the pamphlet [Toward a Revolutionary Party] is profound. While Lenin insists upon the difference between spontaneous consciousness, growing out of labor struggles, and socialist consciousness, and in fact makes the contradiction between the two forms of consciousness the raison de etre of the party, the STO pamphlet sees in the first the unclear and fragmentary articulation of the second.”165

Two different sets of practical implications resulted from this disagreement. One concerned the internal character of STO as a revolutionary organization, which we’ll deal with in Chapter Four. The other centered on the question of mass work and the trade unions. From the perspective of the signers of “The Crisis,” STO’s understanding of dual consciousness led to the view that “there are some features of the everyday struggle of labor against capital that are intrinsically revolutionary,” presumably those that take place outside the trade union structure.166 The documents associated with “The Crisis” never explicitly advocate union reform efforts, or any other concrete alternative to the independent organization approach they criticize. In interviews, however, many former STO members, from both sides of the conflict, remember the stewardship question as having been central to the dispute over the “Crisis” document.167 A two-part shift was thus suggested, which challenged both the optimism that had characterized STO’s approach to production work, and the perceived purity of the group’s methods. Ironically, in down-grading the revolutionary potential of workplace struggles, “The Crisis” simultaneously restored union reform efforts to the central role in the struggle for working-class revolution that they played for the rest of the left.

The “Crisis” paper was hardly the only document drafted in advance of the end-of-year review. Some others were designed specifically to refute the charges leveled therein. One of these, with the less-than-scintillating title “A Critique of the Paper Entitled ‘The Crisis in STO,’” challenged nearly every assumption made and conclusion offered in “The Crisis.”168 Maintaining throughout that the organization was going through a predictable series of ups and downs characteristic of any revolutionary organization, the “Critique” identifies the authors of “The Crisis” as the source of any pending crisis in STO. In particular, it argues that the “demagogy” of the “Crisis” document undermines the potential for resolving what the author concedes are “serious problems which are the result of positive aspects of our political line, our work and our growth.”169 The “Critique” hews closely to the official organizational policy on abstaining from intra-union struggles, while acknowledging that the previous year’s intense emphasis on workplace organizing had hampered the group’s ability to resolve internal problems in the short term. On the topic of trade unions, it argues that “The Crisis” was “posing a caucus strategy in practice and now in theory in opposition to the line of the organization [STO] on building independent organizations at the workplace,” and that “there is a fundamental difference between this line and the line of Sojourner Truth.”170 The issue is posed in stark terms: “Either our theory has to change, or the people who insist on practicing a trade union position have to leave the organization.”171

In the end, the latter is precisely what happened. By the time the review-of-work conference was over, more than a quarter of the membership had left the organization, never to return. Among the departed were some of the group’s most seasoned workplace organizers, including the only person of color then active as a member, Hilda Vasquez. After nearly four years of existence, complete with organizing victories and defeats, slow but steady growth in membership, and carefully targeted geographic expansion, STO had suffered its first real split. It would not be the last one.

* * *

Goldfield and Rothenberg were not the only people to identify problems in STO’s approach to workplace organizing as 1973 came to a close. That fall, the group hosted a visitor from across the Atlantic Ocean, a member of the British group Big Flame.172 Big Flame had been founded in Liverpool in 1970, though by 1973 they had a presence in many parts of England. Like STO, Big Flame took inspiration from the Italian movements highlighted by the Hot Autumn, and, again like STO, Big Flame focused its work in factories. Thus it was understandable that the two groups would establish contact despite the distance between them. For Big Flame, STO as a group was important because it was “the biggest of its kind (our kind) in the States.”173

Nonetheless, the visitor was not overly impressed with STO’s theory or its practice. In a sometimes harshly critical report to Big Flame, the author excoriates STO for “being dominated by an informal hierarchy” and for lacking an educational program for new members. “The internal life of the group,” according to the report, “is consequently full of problems—administratively, politically and personally.” One such problem concerned the limitations of STO’s heavy emphasis on workplace organizing. As the author notes, “The group also has problems understanding any political practice not tied to the workplace. They have no perspective (apart from a possible verbal acknowledgement) on community struggle. There is no understanding of the totality of capitalist oppression—sex roles, the family, personal relations—and therefore the need for socialists to have a total theory and practice, taking in all aspects of capitalist society.” Although STO would eventually develop some theoretical and practical insights into this nexus, the issue would recur over the years, as described in Chapter Six.

The biggest concern expressed in the Big Flame report had to do with STO’s problems in understanding its own role in workplace struggles. Despite STO’s interest in questions of autonomy, the report argues that “although they’ve heard of the concept of autonomy, they haven’t yet learned how to use it.” Focusing on the early influence of C.L.R. James within the group, the report echoes some of the criticisms offered by “The Crisis”: “there is no process or dynamic involved” in STO’s conception of workers, “no dialectic which pushes the working class forward,” leaving only the prospect of spontaneous revolutionary upsurge. On one level, this critique seems inattentive to the complexities of the dual consciousness theory that was then jostling for position within STO with the Jamesian “seeds of socialism” analysis, since dual consciousness as articulated by Hamerquist did at least imply a dialectical interplay between the bourgeois and proletarian aspects of workers’ self-understanding.

Nonetheless, in practical terms, the report to Big Flame was not far off the mark. In the absence of any developed conception of autonomy, claims the report, “they fall back on the Leninist model of the party leading and educating the class, which adds further to their confusion, because it then becomes impossible to understand the dialectic between organization and spontaneity.” Of course, to the extent that “The Crisis” advocated an unambiguous embrace of traditional Leninist strategy, Big Flame was even less sympathetic to this alternative. At the level of activity, the report points out that “any strategy is really based on exemplary action, that is [STO] trying to establish these [independent workplace] groups, and then in some kind of confused way handing them over to the workers.” From the perspective of “The Crisis,” the solution to this was intra-union reform efforts, but Big Flame shared with STO an extra-union perspective. Instead, the report seems to identify the source of the problem in the more general difficulty of attracting non-politicized workers to any sort of permanent left workplace structure. The only solution implied is the development and application of working-class autonomy, although it is not clear exactly how the author believed this would help resolve STO’s difficulties.

* * *

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Don Hamerquist also drafted a paper for the Thanksgiving conference, and while his contribution was not able to prevent the “Crisis” split, it did challenge some prevailing attitudes within the group while attempting to address some of the issues later noted in the report to Big Flame. “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” directly acknowledges the sorts of difficulties the Westside branch had experienced in challenging the former and establishing the latter. In attempting to explain these problems, Hamerquist turns not to a criticism of his own theory of dual consciousness, but to an assessment of two underexamined factors: the flexibility of the trade unions and the instability of the independent, revolutionary, mass workplace organizations that STO championed. The unions, for their part, are not irreparably corrupt, as the group had previously tended to assume. According to Hamerquist, the organization’s earlier writings on production work suggest “that the US trade unions cannot absorb a major insurgency because they are so corrupt that they cannot and will not even handle the routine defense of their members’ interests. The evidence does not support this assumption.”174 As examples, he points to the AFL’s recuperation of the CIO upsurge of the thirties, the British trade unions’ cooptation of the militant shop stewards’ movement of the middle twentieth century, and most intriguingly, the success of the Italian trade unions in absorbing the factory assemblies popularized during the Hot Autumn of 1969. The source of this flexibility has to do with the nature of the trade unions themselves. Whereas STO had previously argued that “unions are basically just a police arm of the employer that is given some legitimacy by workers’ illusions,” Hamerquist maintains that “The general function of trade unions is not the suppression of class struggle, it is the containment of it within the framework of capital. The conservative role of unions is not typically manifested through their becoming an immediate barrier to the initiation of struggle, but through their mediation of the struggle to prevent it from developing in revolutionary directions.”175 In other words, the problems of the Westside branch, for instance, resulted at least in part from the somewhat responsive character of the UAW at Melrose, when STO had been expecting a more obviously regressive union like the IBEW locals at the Hawthorne Works or Stewart-Warner.

As for the independent organization model, the solution to challenges like those faced by the Westside entailed an acknowledgement of the limitations of these organizations, which the document refers to as “workers’ councils” despite their obvious differences from the traditional meaning of this term. Specifically, it was important to view them as inherently unstable, especially when confronting the hegemonic position of the established trade unions. Because consciousness is developed in the course of struggle, the independent organizations were expected to be small and primarily focused on reflection and communication among militant workers. “But even at the abnormal moments,” claims Hamerquist, “so long as the struggles are isolated and sporadic, the council will be narrower than the total constituency of the struggle. We will have to go further along the road to revolution before councils will or can become the legitimate and organic mode of self-organization of the class even in the most developed instances.”176 Short of a broadly revolutionary situation, independent organizations could have only the most limited success in drawing in masses of workers, in part because, in an isolated workplace conflict, they would, at best, function as less corrupt and more militant unions.

In many ways, “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” can be seen as an attempted compromise with the faction that produced the “Crisis” document. In particular, Hamerquist specifically acknowledges the immediate value to workers of responsive unions: “Since there is a valid role for trade unions short of a revolutionary situation, and since the potential for revitalizing US unions cannot be written off, it would be absolutely wrong for communists to regard the trade unionist sentiment within the independent organization as reactionary.”177 At the same time, however, the intra-union approach advocated in “The Crisis” is still rejected, albeit in a more cautious way than before: “In no way should we put ourselves in a position of opposition to union reform. What we can do is try to explain why that is not our priority.”178 In the event, Hamerquist’s concessions to those who wanted to participate in intra-union struggles were insufficient, and the “Crisis” split went forward regardless.

At the same time, Hamerquist’s reflections indicated a growing awareness, common throughout the radical left as the seventies advanced, that a revolution was no longer on the immediate horizon. STO was hardly the only organization during this period to suffer acrimonious splits and frustrating organizing setbacks. The sixties were over, the mass movements of that decade had dissipated instead of intensifying, and in every corner revolutionaries were struggling to grapple with the proper strategy for changing times. Similar considerations may have motivated the departure of the “Crisis” faction as well. Kingsley Clarke was a new member of STO at the time, and he recalls Goldfield and others arguing “that STO had no influence either in the communist movement or in the workers’ movement by virtue of its ultra-left position on independent organizations in the workplace, and that we had better get on board with October League, the New Communist Movement, because they were gaining greatly and we should be moving in that direction.”179 Hamerquist’s strategy for dealing with the organization’s difficulties was fundamentally different, but he too defended the need for a revolutionary organization that could help catalyze workers’ struggles in a nonrevolutionary situation.

But just when the organization believed it had moved beyond the real crisis precipitated by the “Crisis” document, another dissenting faction emerged. These were the “workerists” who had been criticized in “The Crisis”: advocates of complete integration with the working class, they challenged the need for a separate organization of communist militants constructed on the Leninist model. Led by two experienced labor organizers of Polish descent and Argentine upbringing, Guillermo Brzotowski and Elias Zwierzynski, this faction argued that STO’s proper role was to be a service organization to workers, not a leading body of any kind. In line with this analysis, they proposed renaming the Insurgent Worker the Workers’ Toolbox.180 From their perspective, Hamerquist’s reflections in “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” conceded too much to the worst aspects of the “Crisis” document. This didn’t necessarily mean the “workerists” were opposed to trade union work, however. Since their whole approach involved direct immersion in working-class struggles, and because these struggles often took place within the unions, many of the people in this faction took a position on stewardship and the trade unions that was strikingly similar to that outlined by “The Crisis.”

In the summer of 1974, less than one year after the departure of the “Crisis” faction, the “workerists” produced their own lengthy critique of STO, a paper known as “The Head is a Balloon.” The title was a reference to the overly inflated sense of self-importance that the signers attributed to the leadership of the organization, and to its pretensions to leadership of the workers’ movement.181 This problem was only exacerbated by the “Crisis” split, since it led to a situation where, as the report to Big Flame puts it, STO “is now dominated by one or two heavies,” especially Hamerquist and Ignatin.182 “The Head is a Balloon” accused STO of “being dogmatically Leninist, and called for the dissolution of the group into a federation of autonomous work groups.”183 This restructuring was intended to serve both an ideological purpose, opening the group to the independent political perspectives of the workers themselves, and an organizational purpose, sidelining the power of the informal hierarchy. Once again, the organization was plunged into conflict, and again the outcome was a split. The cumulative result was a devastating reduction in size and influence for a group that one year before had been one of the leading left organizations in the Chicago area, at least in the arena of workplace organizing. The acrimony of these two consecutive rifts also drove away a number of individuals who were frustrated with both the slow pace of movement building and the infighting that had come to characterize STO.

In the end, perhaps a half-dozen members remained in an organization that had not long before numbered close to fifty. In a particularly poignant scene, Noel Ignatiev recalls a walk along the Indiana dunes in the summer of 1974 with Don Hamerquist and Carole Travis, the remaining founders of the organization.184 They reminisced about the experiences they had shared over the previous five years, and contemplated an uncertain future. While things had not gone as they had planned, none of them wanted to throw in the towel. They dedicated themselves to the rebuilding the Sojourner Truth Organization from the ground up, a task that they managed to accomplish in a little more than a year, as described in Chapter Four. One basis for this regroupment was a stronger emphasis on theoretical development and ideological agreement. This agreement was based on a number of principles, but one of the most important was the opposition to white supremacy as viewed through the theory of white skin privileges. An examination of the origins and development of this concept comprises the next chapter.

80 Most of the information in this section, including the two direct quotes, is derived from an unsigned article entitled simply “Wildcat at Western Electric,” Insurgent Worker, Spring 1974, 14–17, in author’s possession. Author interview with Noel Ignatiev, January 28, 2006, provided additional context.

81 “Wildcat at Western Electric,” 16. Noel Ignatiev remembered almost exactly the same phrasing during an interview in January, 2006.

82 “Western Electric: We Shall Bury You,” Insurgent Worker, May 1971, 2.

83 At the time, several members of STO were lawyers, and as a result the group exerted significant influence on the local NLG chapter, and the Labor Committee in particular. Author interview with Kingsley Clarke, July 6, 2005.

84 “Wildcat at Western Electric,” 17.

85 The classic work on Marx’s theory of history is G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000 [1978]). A valuable critique from the left of Marx’s theory (written prior to Cohen’s book) can be found in Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), especially pp. 15–54.

86 For simplicity’s sake, but contrary to some Marxist terminological approaches, I will use “working class” and “proletariat” interchangeably, and will use “industrial” as an adjective attached to either phrase to indicate factory workers in particular.

87 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, (1850) “Part I: The Defeat of June 1848,” available online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).

88 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), Volume 1, Chapter 32. Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm (accessed September 15, 2011). This passage can be found on page 929 of the Penguin edition (1990), which translates “trained” instead of “disciplined.” Nate Holdren originally pointed me to this quotation.

89 V.I. Lenin, “On the So-Called Market Question” (1893). Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1893/market/06.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).

90 For a thoughtful and idiosyncratic history of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, see Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution, Volume 3 (London: Continuum, 2004).

91 Antonio Gramsci, “Parties and Masses,” unsigned editorial in L’Ordine Nuovo, September 25, 1921, in Gramsci, Selections From Political Writings, 1921–1926 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 72.

92 For more on the French events, see Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 2002 [1970]), as well as Andree Hoyles, “The Occupation of Factories in France: May 1968,” in Ken Coates, Tony Topham, and Michael Barrett Brown, editors, Trade Union Register (London: Merlin Press, 1969). This latter essay was reprinted by STO in the early seventies as a pamphlet entitled General Strike: France 1968 (Chicago: STO, n.d.).

93 The single best source on the Hot Autumn remains Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy, 1968–1978 (London: Verso, 1990). Much of the text of this book is available online at http://libcom.org/history/states-emergency-cultures-revolt-italy-1968-1978 (accessed September 15, 2011).

94 This use of “workerism” must be distinguished from the more common English usage as (more or less) a synonym for syndicalism. The latter usage was for a time in the early seventies much more common within the New Communist Movement, and within STO. I will use “operaismo” to describe the former, and “workerism” to describe the latter.

95 On the positive response of US leftists to the Italian Hot Autumn, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Marx, Che and Mao (London: Verso, 2002), 88. For contemporaneous US responses to the Hot Autumn and the Italian far left of that era, see two issues of Radical America 5, no. 5, September/October, 1971, and 7, no. 2, March/April, 1973. For a marvelously comprehensive analysis of the theoretical universe within which the Hot Autumn erupted, including background on both Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

96 Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998 [1975]), 49–51.

97 Telephone interview with Noel Ignatiev, July 16, 2005.

98 Much of the information that follows comes from Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, “General Introduction,” in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

99 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1846), Chapter One, Part B. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).

100 See Sojourner Truth Organization, Toward a Revolutionary Party: Ideas on Strategy and Organization (Chicago: STO, 1976 [1971]). Hereafter, TARP. This pamphlet was officially signed by STO, but was largely written by Hamerquist. The full text is available online at http://sojournertruth.net/tarp.html (accessed September 15, 2011).

101 Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing” (1970), in Sojourner Truth Organization, Workplace Papers (Chicago: STO, 1980), 11.

102 TARP, 32. Ellipsis in original.

103 See, for example, Ted Allen, “White Supremacy in US History” (1973), in the collection Understanding and Fighting White Supremacy (Chicago: STO, 1976). This text is available online at http://www.sojournertruth.net/whitesupremushist.html (accessed September 15, 2011).

104 V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1902), available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ (accessed September 15, 2011).

105 This is sometimes portrayed as the contrast between the Lenin of What is to be Done? and the Lenin of State and Revolution, which was written in 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.

106 TARP, 13.

107 For an analysis of the conservative and corrupt character of the North American labor movement at the end of the sixties, see Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).

108 For more on the IWW, see Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998); and Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, eds., Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Verso, 2005).

109 Noel Ignatin, “Preface,” in Workplace Papers, iii.

110 Author interview with Don Hamerquist, September 14, 2006. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this document has also been lost. For more on the concept of the general strike within a wobbly context, see The General Strike for Industrial Freedom (Chicago: IWW, 1946).

111 See the unsigned Outline History of Sojourner Truth, September 1972, in Detroit Revolutionary Movements Collection, Subseries F, box 15, Reuther Library, Wayne State University. This document is available online at http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/sto.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).

112 Telephone interview with John Strucker, February 5, 2006.

113 Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago,” in Collective Works 1, no. 1, October 1974, 11–20. This piece pseudonymously refers to the “AC” plant, and changes the names of STO members and ex-members then working there, in order to protect the then-ongoing organizing efforts. However, the description of the plant and STO’s efforts there clearly match the descriptions offered in interviews with several former STO members, especially John Strucker, February 5, 2006.

114 This information comes largely from my interviews in 2006 with John Strucker, Don Hamerquist (who worked there for a time), and Noel Ignatiev (who never worked there).

115 See the “shop sheets” appendix at the end of Workplace Papers. Noel Ignatiev provided me with photocopies of dozens of additional shop sheets.

116 Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing,” 10.

117 Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago,” 13.

118 “What We Want,” in Bread and Roses: A Paper by and for Working Women 1, no. 1 (n.d., but late 1970), 2. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Bloom Alternative Press Collection. Bread and Roses was also apparently the last publication to be put out under the name “Sojourner Truth Communist Organization.” The May 1971 edition of the Insurgent Worker was attributed simply to the “Sojourner Truth Organization.”

119 See Insurgent Worker Nov–Dec. 1971 on the controls and on Attica, and Insurgent Worker June/July 1972 on Vietnam and GI resistance.

120 In some cases the progression was in the opposite direction: campaigns first, publications second, although in most of the major points of concentration, and certainly at Stewart-Warner, the publications came first. Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago.”

121 Talk Back 2, no. 5, February 25, 1974, in author’s possession. Sections of this issue, including documents from the “Filthy Billy” union election campaign, as well as other leaflets STO distributed on shop floors at other factories, are available online at http://sojournertruth.net/shopleaflets.pdf (accessed September 21, 2011).

122 In one case, an STO member at Stewart-Warner helped initiate a campaign to unseat a particularly corrupt steward, only to be forced to abandon the effort when no other candidate was forthcoming from the department, despite his co-workers attempts to convince him to run himself. Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago.”

123 “Who We Are,” Breakout! 1, no. 4, December 11, 1973, 2.

124 Telephone interview with John Strucker, February 5, 2006.

125 Kingsley Clarke, interview with author, July 6, 2005.

126 Author interviews with Noel Ignatiev, January 22, 2006; Don Hamerquist, September 14, 2006; and Carole Travis, June 6, 2006.

127 Much of the information that follows comes from an unpublished memoir by Beth Henson, in author’s possession, as well as the interviews with Noel Ignatiev, January 22, 2006; and Kingsley Clarke, July 6, 2005.

128 Henson, Memoir, 3.

129 Ibid., 5. Clarke remembers the same sequence of events. Author interview, April 2, 2006.

130 Henson, Memoir, 5–6.

131 For a useful analysis of inflation as a capitalist tactic during the seventies, see Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (San Francisco: AK Press, 2000 [1979]), especially 157–158.

132 An image of this poster is reproduced in the Spring 1974 edition of the Insurgent Worker, 19.

133 See “Payoff for Terror on the Road,” Time, February 18, 1974.

134 Talk Back 2, no. 5, Feb. 25, 1974.

135 This and subsequent quotes are from the interview with Carole Travis, June 6, 2006. Ellipses mine.

136 See “Payoff for Terror on the Road,” Time, February 18, 1974.

137 See Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, esp. Chapter 7. The Insurgent Worker, May 1971, contains an optimistic description of the founding of the Black Workers’ Congress.

138 Interview with Noel Ignatiev, January 22, 2006.

139 I have been unable to locate a copy of this paper, which is described in the “Outline History of Sojourner Truth Organization” (1972).

140 STO, The United Front Against Imperialism? (Chicago: STO, 1972).

141 STO, Organizing Working Class Women (Chicago: STO, n.d., but probably 1972).

142 Organizing Working Class Women, 4–5.

143 For more on the Farah strike, see Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig, Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story (El Paso: Reforma, 1979).

144 Kathy W., “A Lesson in What Democratic Centralism Is Not, or How a Representative-Democratic Exec Did Not Work in a Revolutionary Organization,” unpublished paper in author’s possession, n.d, but approximately November, 1973.

145 This is described in the unsigned “Letter From El Paso,” in the Insurgent Worker, July 1973, 10–13. Additional information came from author interview with Guillermo Brzotowski, October 10, 2008.

146 Kathy W., “A Lesson.”

147 Author interview, Guillermo Brzotowski, October 10, 2008.

148 This problem was emphasized in author interview with Mel and Marsha Rothenberg, October 12, 2006, as well as in correspondence from George Schmidt, May, 2006.

149 Mel Rothenberg, Interview, October 12, 2006. It is worth noting that Rothenberg himself was a university professor and never worked in a factory during his time as a member of STO.

150 Interview with John Strucker, March 26, 2006.

151 Author interview with Kingsley Clarke, July 6, 2005.

152 Author interview with Noel Ignatiev, January 22, 2006.

153 Note on page 0 of the January 1972 edition of STO, Mass Organization in the Workplace (Chicago: STO, 1972).

154 Don Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing” (1970), in STO, Workplace Papers (Chicago: STO, 1980). This piece was also published in edited form, and signed by ”Members of Sojourner Truth,” in Radical America 6, no.2, March/April, 1972.

155 Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing,” 9.

156 Ibid., 12.

157 Ibid., 14–15.

158 Author interview with Marsha and Mel Rothenberg, October, 2006. Similar perspectives are put forward in Al, Evi, Gary, Hilda, Jim C., Marsha, Mel, Mike and Pauline, “The Crisis in STO” (n.d., but fall 1973), unpublished paper in author’s possession.

159 George S., “Critique of the Paper Entitled ‘The Crisis in STO’,” unpublished paper in author’s possession (n.d., but fall 1973).

160 Author interview with Marsha and Mel Rothenberg, October, 2006. Nonetheless, Goldfield’s proposals to prioritize mass work were accepted by STO in its annual review at the end of 1972. George S., “A Critique.”

161 “The Crisis in STO” p. 2. Ellipsis mine.

162 Ibid., 4.

163 Ibid., 8. The phrases “politics in command” and “technique in command” were popularized in English by William Hinton, a North American farmer sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution. See William Hinton, The Turning Point: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

164 “The Crisis in STO,” 10.

165 Al, Evie, Gary, Hilda, Jim C., Marcia, Mel, Mike and Pauline, “The Role of a Proletarian Party in the Development of Mass Socialist Consciousness” (n.d, but fall 1973), unpublished paper in author’s possession, 3.

166 “The Role…,” 9. Emphasis in original.

167 Author interviews with Noel Ignatiev, John Strucker, Kingsley Clarke, Carole Travis, Don Hamerquist, and Marsha & Mel Rothenberg all confirm this perception.

168 George S., “A Critique.”

169 Ibid.

170 Ibid., 14.

171 Ibid.

172 The single best source for information on Big Flame is a website that contains both archival documents and contemporary reflections on the group’s activities and legacy. http://bigflameuk.wordpress.com (accessed September 27, 2011).

173 This and subsequent quotations in the next four paragraphs come from the “Report on the Sojourner Truth Group in Chicago,” unpublished paper in author’s possession, n.d., but probably early 1974. Thanks to Kevin McDonnell for providing me with a copy of this document.

174 Don Hamerquist, “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” (1973) in Workplace Papers (Chicago: STO,1980), 38.

175 Ibid.

176 Ibid., 45.

177 Ibid., 52.

178 Ibid.

179 Author interview with Kingsley Clarke, April 2, 2006.

180 Author interview with Don Hamerquist, September 14, 2006. Telephone interviews with Elias Zwierzinski, January 1, 2007, and Guillermo Brzotowski, October 10, 2008, corroborate the basic outline though neither of them recalled the specific debate over the title of the publication.

181 Telephone interviews with Elias Zwierzinski, January 1, 2007, and Guillermo Brzotowski, October 10, 2008, provided context and insight into the paper, which I have been unable to obtain. While most former members attribute authorship to Zwierzinski and Brzotowski, Brzotowski himself denies having been central to drafting it.

182 “Report on the Sojourner Truth Group in Chicago.”

183 Noel Ignatin, “Outline History of STO,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.

184 Author interview with Noel Ignatiev, January 22, 2006.