workplace organizers, was drawn to the possibility of becoming a departmental steward; both his coworkers and his branch mates supported him, while other STO members were harshly critical. As early as the fall of 1972, such criticisms led Goldfield and his supporters to feel as if they were being marginalized within the organization.160
By late 1973, conflict came to a head at the meeting where members reviewed the previous year’s work, which was held over Thanksgiving weekend at a retreat center in Michigan. In advance of the meeting, Goldfield and another STO member named Mel Rothenberg drafted a paper entitled “The Crisis in STO,” which was subsequently signed by seven additional members of the group, including the entire Westside branch. In many ways, this document skirts the trade union issue, preferring instead to argue its points on the plane of STO’s party-building efforts and the question of correct interpretations of Leninism (these issues will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter Four). However, the early sections of the piece contain an assessment of the organization’s mass work, including thinly veiled criticisms of the extra-union orientation that guided STO’s approach to workplace struggles. “The Crisis” begins by asking a number of critical questions about difficulties that the Westside branch had encountered in organizing at the International Harvester plant: “Why has so much direct action at Melrose not contributed towards the development of a growing, stable, independent organization?… Why have we been unable to build a sustained, coherent, credible alternative to trade unionist forms of struggle?”161
In answering these questions, the paper identifies two factions of the organization that, while superficially opposed to each other, formed a unified obstacle to STO’s success in the workplace. The authors label these factions the “workerist tendency” and the “bureaucratic tendency.” The former is consistent with the earlier description of total immersion in mass work and an attempt at complete integration with the working class. The latter represents an approach that prioritized organizational growth and structure above mass work. According to “The Crisis,” “these two antagonistic tendencies can co-exist and complement each other, not only in the organization, but at various times in the minds of the same individuals.”162 In contrast, the signers of “The Crisis” position themselves as a faction advancing the Maoist position of “politics in command,” within which the theoretical line would determine everything. This they opposed to the “technique in command” stance supposedly shared by the workerists and the bureaucrats, all of whom, according to “The Crisis,” emphasized a mechanistic devotion to tactics instead of theory.163
According to the paper, the roots of STO’s crisis were to be found in the theoretical incoherence of the group’s line on class consciousness, as expressed primarily in Toward a Revolutionary Party. The idea of “leading workers into an organizational form where they can ‘experience’ socialism in action,” as implied by Hamerquist’s dual consciousness theory, “shows a contempt for workers’ immediate interests, refuses to rely on workers’ ability to think and develop politically, and poses a behavioristic shortcut to class consciousness.”164 The question of a “shortcut” is key: dual consciousness theory ignores the necessary developmental process by which workers internalize the transformative vision put forward by conscious revolutionaries. By contrast, “The Crisis” advocates a return to the more traditionally Leninist theory of trade-union and revolutionary consciousness, which not coincidentally offered greater latitude to those interested in union reform efforts. In a follow-up paper with the telling title “The Role of a Proletarian Party in the Development of Mass Socialist Consciousness,” this contrast is clarified:
The difference between Lenin’s conception of the development of socialist consciousness and the view put forth by the pamphlet [Toward a Revolutionary Party] is profound. While Lenin insists upon the difference between spontaneous consciousness, growing out of labor struggles, and socialist consciousness, and in fact makes the contradiction between the two forms of consciousness the raison de etre of the party, the STO pamphlet sees in the first the unclear and fragmentary articulation of the second.”165
Two different sets of practical implications resulted from this disagreement. One concerned the internal character of STO as a revolutionary organization, which we’ll deal with in Chapter Four. The other centered on the question of mass work and the trade unions. From the perspective of the signers of “The Crisis,” STO’s understanding of dual consciousness led to the view that “there are some features of the everyday struggle of labor against capital that are intrinsically revolutionary,” presumably those that take place outside the trade union structure.166 The documents associated with “The Crisis” never explicitly advocate union reform efforts, or any other concrete alternative to the independent organization approach they criticize. In interviews, however, many former STO members, from both sides of the conflict, remember the stewardship question as having been central to the dispute over the “Crisis” document.167 A two-part shift was thus suggested, which challenged both the optimism that had characterized STO’s approach to production work, and the perceived purity of the group’s methods. Ironically, in down-grading the revolutionary potential of workplace struggles, “The Crisis” simultaneously restored union reform efforts to the central role in the struggle for working-class revolution that they played for the rest of the left.
The “Crisis” paper was hardly the only document drafted in advance of the end-of-year review. Some others were designed specifically to refute the charges leveled therein. One of these, with the less-than-scintillating title “A Critique of the Paper Entitled ‘The Crisis in STO,’” challenged nearly every assumption made and conclusion offered in “The Crisis.”168 Maintaining throughout that the organization was going through a predictable series of ups and downs characteristic of any revolutionary organization, the “Critique” identifies the authors of “The Crisis” as the source of any pending crisis in STO. In particular, it argues that the “demagogy” of the “Crisis” document undermines the potential for resolving what the author concedes are “serious problems which are the result of positive aspects of our political line, our work and our growth.”169 The “Critique” hews closely to the official organizational policy on abstaining from intra-union struggles, while acknowledging that the previous year’s intense emphasis on workplace organizing had hampered the group’s ability to resolve internal problems in the short term. On the topic of trade unions, it argues that “The Crisis” was “posing a caucus strategy in practice and now in theory in opposition to the line of the organization [STO] on building independent organizations at the workplace,” and that “there is a fundamental difference between this line and the line of Sojourner Truth.”170 The issue is posed in stark terms: “Either our theory has to change, or the people who insist on practicing a trade union position have to leave the organization.”171
In the end, the latter is precisely what happened. By the time the review-of-work conference was over, more than a quarter of the membership had left the organization, never to return. Among the departed were some of the group’s most seasoned workplace organizers, including the only person of color then active as a member, Hilda Vasquez. After nearly four years of existence, complete with organizing victories and defeats, slow but steady growth in membership, and carefully targeted geographic expansion, STO had suffered its first real split. It would not be the last one.
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Goldfield
