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
