target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_c0ad9380-2489-5dea-b3a4-211fb6bef389">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.
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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
