Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986

By Michael Staudenmaier and John H. Bracey

Founded in Chicago in 1969 from the rubble of the recently crumbled SDS, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) brought working-class consciousness to the forefront of New Left discourse, sending radicals back into the factories and thinking through the integration of radical politics into everyday realities. Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies.

Michael Staudenmaier is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois-Urbana.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849350983

Michael Staudenmaier

Michael Staudenmaier is an assistant professor of history at Manchester University. He writes and teaches about Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, Latina/o/x social movements in the second half of the twentieth century, and the roles of race, racism, and antiracism in US history.

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Introduction: A Donation for Anarchy

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

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

We want no condescending saviors

To rule us from their judgment hall,

We workers ask not for their favors

Let us consult for all:

To make the thief disgorge his booty

To free the spirit from its cell,

We must ourselves decide our duty,

We must decide, and do it well.

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

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

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

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

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

Part One:

The Working Life

Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,

The working, the working, just the working life.

Bruce Springsteen, Factory

Chapter One: 1969, The Revolution That Didn’t Happen

Nineteen sixty-nine was a difficult year for North American revolutionaries. Black radicals, in the Black Panther Party and other groups, were under direct attack by the FBI and local police across the United States. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the flagship organization of the white new left, imploded at its annual convention in Chicago. The war in Vietnam was intensifying, as Richard Nixon reinforced and expanded the imperialist foreign policy that Lyndon Johnson had previously administered. Everywhere the initiatives championed by the new left were on the defensive, as capital and the state dug in their heels to defend the status quo.

At the same time, 1969 was also a year of great optimism for North American revolutionaries. Enormous numbers of young people across the country embraced the term revolution. In the eyes of many, the wheat was being separated from the chaff, as the gulf between culturally oriented hippies and ideologically committed militants grew ever greater. The collapse of SDS was viewed as a symbol of the limits of student-centered radicalism, and attention turned to the growing wave of wildcat strikes in a variety of industries where workers were openly rejecting the sweetheart deals that mainstream unions had established with employers. An increasingly radical women’s movement was growing by leaps and bounds, challenging male supremacy within both mainstream society and the established left. If the bad guys were digging in for a fight, the good guys were getting more sophisticated, more determined, and more energized in their efforts to turn the world upside-down.

In this contradictory context, a small number of revolutionaries in Chicago spent the fall of 1969 discussing the state of the movement and the prospects for radical social change. The process culminated, sometime between Christmas and the New Year, in the founding of the Sojourner Truth Organization, a group that would spend most of the next two decades critically engaged in revolutionary struggles. In order to better understand the origins of STO, it is useful to briefly review the circumstances in which its founding members found themselves in the year leading up to the group’s inception.

* * *

The black movement was both huge and diverse in 1969, although signs were already visible of the pressures, both external and internal, that would decimate it as the seventies progressed. The civil rights movement had been torn for some time between the reformist approach of most of the major southern organizations and the increasing radicalism of the urban rebellions that began in the mid-sixties.⁷ By the time Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the organized face of the black movement included groups like the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Republic of New Afrika, and the Revolutionary Action Movement. These and other organizations advocated black power and favored a revolutionary approach to the problem of white supremacy, in contrast to the reformism of more established formations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and even the Congress of Racial Equality. But as the number of radical black groups proliferated, so did the tensions between them, and in some cases inside them. Some of these conflicts were the result of government repression and COINTELPRO tactics, while in other cases the FBI and local police exploited already-existing disagreements between groups to further fracture the movement.⁸ For a time, the problems at the organizational level were more than outweighed by the vibrant mass movement of black people everywhere against the daily experience of racism in all arenas of life. As this momentum dissipated over the succeeding decade, the difficulties plaguing the organized black left served as both cause and effect of the decline. But even before the movement as a whole was in trouble, the conflicts and the repression had a ripple effect on the rest of the left.

The Panthers, in particular, had ties to SDS and other largely white groups, so their internal tensions and the government attacks they suffered had a demoralizing effect on the section of the white movement that took inspiration from their bold rhetoric and deep commitment to social change.⁹ Over the course of 1969, the BPP was on the receiving end of just about every form of government repression one can think of. Activities and communications were subject to surveillance, key leaders were arrested on trumped-up charges, and the Panthers’ public commitment to armed self-defense was used as an excuse for police to conduct violent assaults on their offices and the homes of members. On April 2, the Panther 21 were arrested in New York City and charged with conspiracy, arson, and attempted murder; although they would eventually be acquitted, their legal defense put significant strain on the BPP’s east coast operations.¹⁰ Then on December 4, the Chicago Police Department invaded the home of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, murdering him in his bed and also killing BPP leader Mark Clark.¹¹ Internally, these and other attacks did nothing to diminish the growing divide between the Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver factions of the BPP, which by early in 1971 had turned into a full-blown split in the Party.¹²

It was impossible at the time to predict the coming decline in the black movement. In part, this was due to other developments that were much more encouraging. The most impressive of these was the emergence of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in Detroit during the summer of 1969.¹³ The League represented an alternative to the Black Panther Party, both in its organizing methods and in its constituency. Where the Panthers advocated the rhetorical flourish, the open show of firearms, and the establishment of direct service antipoverty programs, the League preferred grassroots organizing in the workplace, the use of legal defense as a form of propaganda, and the creation of alternative media institutions like publishing houses. In each case, the means chosen reflected the segment of the population targeted by the group: the BPP aimed its efforts at the black underclass, including unemployed and semicriminal elements, while the League attempted to engage sectors of the black working class, especially in the auto industry and in community colleges. These differences held enormous significance for the future members of STO, who were much more interested in the LRBW than they were in the Panthers.¹⁴

The League was always an unstable combination of organizers with different agendas and strategies, but it symbolized a convergence of the black movement with the promise of workplace rebellions like the wildcat strike at the Dodge plant in Hamtramck, Michigan in May, 1968. This strike led to the creation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), from which came some of the founding members of the League a year later.¹⁵ Others came out of the black student movement and from a loose collection of slightly older activists in Detroit. The unique situation of Detroit as a heavily black and heavily industrialized city limited the applicability to other locales, but the example of the League was certainly inspiring to a cross-section of the white left, just at a moment when the problems facing the Panthers were becoming difficult to ignore.

The LRBW was not the only positive news from the black movement, either. The legacy of the civil rights movement as a militant, grassroots struggle with an undeniable base of support in black communities nationwide was still strong, despite King’s death and the organizational splintering described above. As early as 1967, Carl Davidson, a leading member of SDS, argued that

the black ghetto rebellions this summer fundamentally altered the political reality of white America, including the white left. The black liberation movement has replaced the civil rights and anti-poverty movements, revealing the utter bankruptcy of corporate liberalism’s cooptive programs. The events of this summer marked not only the possibility, but the beginning of the second American revolution.¹⁶

Two years later, despite all their difficulties, the Panthers remained a highly visible organization that at least initially seemed to hold up well under increasing government repression. Smart revolutionaries understood that any serious attempt to overthrow capitalism would face the harshest possible attacks from the power structure, and the black movement was perceived as the segment of the US population most prepared for these attacks and most committed to resisting them.

* * *

One result of the League’s activities, especially its commitment to self-promotion through alternative media, was that, as the sixties came to a close, increasing numbers of young leftists began to pay attention to the industrial workplace as a site of social struggles. Several factors had previously kept the new left from investigating workplace struggles. The dominance of SDS within the white new left led to an overwhelming emphasis on student issues and campus-based struggles. Even when they turned their attentions outward, most student radicals focused their efforts on community organizing and antipoverty campaigns, rather than labor issues. Many SDS members felt nothing but disdain for the old left politics of groups that had historically emphasized work within organized labor. The Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers’ Party, and others were widely perceived as reformist at best and corruptly reactionary at worst.

And of course the official labor movement was subject to even more stinging criticism and dismissal. As Carole Travis, a founding and long-time member of STO, emphasized, no one thought that they [unions] were valuable to social change at all.¹⁷ A lengthy campaign to bureaucratize the labor movement simultaneously purged almost all major unions of openly radical voices, a process eagerly supported by the US government under the auspices of anti-Communism.¹⁸ The merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955 had cemented the commitment of mainstream labor unions to labor peace. By the late sixties, the AFL-CIO was one of the most reactionary entities in US politics, with a membership that largely supported the Vietnam War, opposed civil rights and women’s liberation, and routinely tolerated corrupt sweetheart agreements with employers. The leadership had ties to the CIA and to the mafia, and the rank and file was largely dismissed by the left as having no revolutionary potential. Weatherman, the wing of SDS that would later be known as the Weather Underground, argued in its initial political statement that unionized skilled workers had a higher level of privilege relative to the oppressed colonies, including the blacks, and relative to more oppressed workers in the mother country; so that there is a strong material basis for racism and loyalty to the system, and by the fall of 1969 the group had embraced the slogan fight the people, with only a tinge of irony.¹⁹ While other radicals harshly criticized this line, it was in many ways only a slightly exaggerated reflection of the positions held by much of the revolutionary left at the end of the decade.

Against this backdrop, only a small number of radicals gave any serious thought to engaging in workplace organizing. Nonetheless, under the very noses of a largely ignorant new left, explosive labor struggles were taking place in an array of industries across the country. Many, perhaps most, of these fights pitted rank and file workers against both the management and the union leadership, resulting in a growing wave of wildcat strikes like the one that spawned DRUM in 1968.²⁰ From bus drivers and postal workers to machinists and longshoremen, the working class was becoming increasingly aware of its own power, as opposed to the supposed power of its self-proclaimed representatives. This was true both in the US and elsewhere, as the French general strike of 1968 and the Italian Hot Autumn of 1969 indicated.²¹ To the small minority of the left that was paying attention, workplace struggles began to seem full of revolutionary potential.

One factor that influenced this assessment was the relatively integrated character of many larger workplaces in the United States, especially in heavy industry and some service-sector work (such as hospitals and transportation). Racism was certainly an inescapable reality for black and latino workers, who routinely received the worst paid, least safe, and least secure jobs in any factory, assuming they were able to find employment at all in the face of double-digit unemployment for nonwhites, especially youth.²² Once on the job, however, workers of color brought with them the lessons learned from two decades of the civil rights movement. And in many cases, they were able to teach these lessons to disaffected younger whites who increasingly saw the limits of individual attempts at rebellion in the form of long hair and dope smoking.

For both black and white young men in the working class, the war in Vietnam represented the ever-present threat of draft and death. For those who survived their tour of duty, factory bosses often became the object of residual anger that had previously been targeted at commanding officers. The result was an increase in shop floor militancy, a willingness to confront perceived injustice and demand change, and an openness to radical perspectives. It’s likely that only a handful of the workers involved in wildcats and other struggles went into them with anything like an anticapitalist worldview, but more than a few emerged as committed revolutionaries with remarkable organizing experience and a strong sense of solidarity.

One segment of the new left, including many of the people who would go on to found STO at the end of 1969, took an interest in this underpublicized movement, especially once groups like DRUM and the LRBW used recognizably revolutionary rhetoric to describe struggles that might otherwise have seemed reformist in spite of their militancy. Upon reflection, the wave of wildcats could be seen as a validation of two traditional insights of Marxism. First, the fact that they took place outside the union structure was a confirmation of the longstanding radical claim that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, rather than the work of trade union bureaucracies.²³ Second, the factory was able to discipline workers, teaching them solidarity and cooperation even while it imposed competition and division. Insurgent organizing efforts served as experience that helped prepare the working class to run society. While few if any of the wildcats of the late sixties and early seventies resulted in factory occupations, much less the continuation of production under worker control, this was a presumptive next step that was much discussed by revolutionaries both inside and outside the workplace.

* * *

If conflict at the point of production was intensifying as the sixties came to a close, conflict around the war in Southeast Asia was even more explosive. This was perhaps the only arena in which the momentum of the new left did not falter in 1969, despite the confused character of the increasingly disparate antiwar movement. Demonstrations continued to draw enormous crowds, just as they had in preceding years. Direct actions against draft boards and military recruitment offices became more frequent and more violent. The number of draft resisters continued to rise as young men fled to Canada and elsewhere to avoid induction. Perhaps more important, resistance within the military became more pronounced and more radical. The number of fraggings (violent assaults on commanding officers, often using fragmentation grenades with intent to kill) skyrocketed in 1969, and the number of desertions increased dramatically over the previous year.²⁴

In short, the antiwar movement was becoming more proletarian in its orientation, as young working-class enlisted men and their families began to question the war effort. Just a few years before, opposition to the Vietnam War had been confined to the middle class, and especially to student radicals at more or less prestigious universities and to religiously oriented progressives. There had always been a strong moral component to the antiwar movement, partly inherited from the pacifist legacy of previous movements during Korea and World War Two.²⁵ But as the Vietnam War became less and less popular with mainstream Americans, the moral basis of the antiwar movement became something of a stumbling block. Draft dodging and counter-recruitment, for instance, could be ridiculed as middle-class escapism and patronizing missionary work, respectively.

The increasing radicalism of the student left, coupled with its rapid expansion into the realm of second tier state universities and community colleges, provided an opening in which connections could be built across the class divide. Once again, the black movement was the fulcrum point, as civil rights veterans began to turn their attentions to the racism of the draft and the parallels between the experience of African Americans and that of the Vietnamese. Martin Luther King famously spoke out in opposition to the war shortly before his assassination in 1968, and the world champion boxer Muhammad Ali refused military service as early as 1966, saying I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.²⁶ Racism inside the military may also have helped to radicalize the GI resistance movement: some activists believed that white enlisted men were being forced to choose between white supremacy and class solidarity as they decided whether to side with largely black deserters or their mostly white commanding officers.²⁷

Unfortunately, the radical potential of a broad-based antiwar movement was undercut at the end of the sixties by several factors, chief among them the internalized white supremacy of the white working class and the ascension of Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1969 on a supposedly antiwar platform. In contrast to the student movement, which was headed toward the pro-Vietcong stance best typified by Weathermen marching at the Days of Rage in Chicago with Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) flags, the mainstream antiwar movement was always couched in the language of patriotism.²⁸ On one level this was yet another legacy of the civil rights movement, which had, for the most part, considered inclusion of blacks as full citizens to be a truly American goal. But a bigger issue was the insidious nature of white supremacy and imperialism. Except for a small core of revolutionaries, most white people opposed the war out of concern for the safety and well-being of young white men in the US military. The cost of the war on the people and land of Vietnam, and even upon black and latino soldiers, were of only marginal concern at best. This racism also influenced mainstream responses to draft dodging and GI resistance. Young men fleeing to Canada (mostly white) received a fair bit of positive press coverage, while those participating in army rebellions (often black) were either ignored or denounced.²⁹

Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, and his southern strategy of appealing to white racial resentment of the civil rights movement only reconfirmed the tight grip of white supremacy on the electoral process.³⁰ In the context of the campaign, however, Nixon actually came to represent a certain type of antiwar sentiment. Without any specifics, he promised a new approach to the war in Vietnam, which was known as the secret plan. Given the growing distaste among white liberals for the war’s rising death toll, Nixon represented a change from five years of escalating involvement in Vietnam under Lyndon Johnson. Despite some late efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s policy, Hubert Humphrey represented, for many people, a Democratic Party committed to staying the course. While mainstream opposition to the war was increasing, it found an unfortunate outlet in support for Nixon.

The result was a confused antiwar movement, which in 1969 encompassed both white, racist Nixon supporters in the south and black revolutionaries killing their CO’s in Vietnam, white revolutionaries flying Vietcong flags in Chicago and black civil rights leaders across the country still tied to a floundering Democratic Party. Great opportunities were overlaid with huge internal disagreements, and the radicals who would found STO at the end of the year were most likely at a loss for how best to proceed.

* * *

One social movement of the late sixties, the women’s movement, cut across the grain of the others. Initially an outgrowth of women’s involvement in the civil rights movement and the new left, by 1969 feminists had begun to challenge male supremacy not only in mainstream society but also within the left as well. The available targets were so many and varied that the result was a women’s liberation movement whose ideological diversity nearly matched that of the antiwar milieu. It included everyone from lesbian separatists to revolutionary communists to budding capitalist functionaries. While these internal contradictions wouldn’t become unresolvable until the early seventies, they were already exerting a complicated effect on the new left as a whole.

There were at least three versions of feminism in the United States during the late sixties, which might be termed liberal feminism, radical feminism, and feminist radicalism.³¹ The first of these was to become in many ways the defining aspect of the movement, as middle-class, white women struggled to gain entry to the male power structure. Corporate jobs, professional careers, access to the military, and the right to work full time instead of being at home with the children—these were the primary goals of liberal feminists. The presumption was that women—at least, white, middle-class women—could be integrated successfully into the economic sphere without jeopardizing the health of capitalism. It turns out that they were right, even though wage disparities persist for women and men in equivalent jobs. With the possible exception of some Marxists who viewed this integration as a stepping stone toward the creation of a fully bourgeois society that would then inevitably be toppled by proletarian revolution, almost no one in the new left, men or women, had any use for liberal feminism.

The distinction between radical feminism and feminist radicalism, as the names suggest, was largely one of emphasis. Both camps rejected liberalism and looked toward fundamental social change as a necessity for women’s liberation. But where feminist radicals tied the success of feminism to the broader project of social revolution, radical feminists saw the oppression of women as the root of social ills ranging from war to capitalism. This led radical feminists to criticize, and in some cases to reject outright, the rest of the left as a bastion of male supremacy and a detour from the essential work of freeing women as women.³² This approach was always double-edged. On the one hand, it produced brilliant insights into the nature of oppression and resistance: the claim that the personal is political, for instance, and the use of consciousness raising as a way to organize women in all spheres of life. Similarly, the critique of sexism and macho behavior within the new left, typified in essays like Marge Piercy’s Grand Coolie Damn, was clearly on target. She began her essay by noting that

the Movement is supposed to be for human liberation. How come the condition of women inside it is no better than outside? We have been trying to educate and agitate around women’s liberation for several years. How come things are getting worse? Women’s liberation has raised the level of consciousness around a set of issues and given some women a respite from the incessant exploitation, invisibility, and being put down. But several forces have been acting on the Movement to make the situation of women actually worse during the same time that more women are becoming aware of their oppression.³³

At the same time, the prioritization of women’s supposedly common experience as women underplayed the divisions between the lives of women of different backgrounds (black and white, poor and rich, young and old, lesbian and straight, etc.). This blindspot alienated many working-class women who otherwise might well have been open to the insights feminism had to offer. As a result, the work of radical feminists began to reflect more and more narrowly the lived experience of white, middle-class, educated women.³⁴ The trajectory from here to liberalism was never foregone, but neither is it hard to divine.

By contrast, feminist radicals emphasized the need to include women’s issues within the overall analysis of the new left. Without ignoring the problems of sexism in broader social movements, they argued that women’s problems could not be solved without simultaneously addressing racism, the war, and what new leftists called the system.³⁵ For a number of women, including several founders of STO, this meant first and foremost addressing the concerns of working-class women, women of color, and the women of Vietnam. In doing so, it became clear that many of these issues—poverty and discrimination in the black community, for instance, or war crimes in Southeast Asia—were primarily about race and class, and only secondarily about sex. From this perspective, the limits of the radical feminist worldview seemed increasingly frustrating to the feminist radicals. In some cases, this led to a baby and bathwater sort of reaction, where even the important lessons of consciousness raising were dismissed as middle-class diversions.³⁶ The personal might be political, but women doing ten-hour piecework shifts in textile factories have more urgent problems than being forced to conform to men’s standards of beauty. The solution, according to the feminist radicals, was social revolution with a feminist twist.

Another, tangentially related development in 1969 was the birth of the modern gay rights movement during the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. On the night of June 27, police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, continuing a longstanding tradition of harassing gay men, lesbians, and drag queens in one of the only places they could then congregate.³⁷ For reasons that are still disputed today, the patrons resisted the police, and successfully forced them to retreat in fear for their own safety. In one of the most heavily queer neighborhoods in the United States, this small altercation quickly blossomed into a full scale riot during which 2,000 or more angry gays and lesbians fought several hundred police officers for control of the streets. At least two more nights of fighting followed, and the movement for gay and lesbian liberation burst upon the scene, taking obvious inspiration from both the black and feminist movements in its combination of consciousness raising and militant street tactics.

In later years, the lesbian and gay liberation movement would fracture under the strain of divisions similar to those encountered by the women’s movement of the late sixties. Nonetheless, both gay and lesbian liberation and feminism were sources of great enthusiasm and optimism (as well as dread and derision) on the left as the decade came to a close. The strategic choices implied by the various tendencies within both movements ensured that no one could predict what the seventies had in store for feminism or for the gay movement.

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A striking number of feminists, if only a limited segment of the gay and lesbian movement, cut their teeth on the student movement of the sixties, especially within Students for a Democratic Society.³⁸ SDS had grown dramatically over the course of the decade, from a small organization of progressive students at mostly elite universities to a massive network of radical youth from all walks of life, including many who were not even students. But expansion led also to heightened disagreement over politics and strategy. Regular meetings of the group in the late sixties were marked by ever more bitter argument between two leading factions: