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
