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.
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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.
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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,
