That fall, the group hosted a visitor from across the Atlantic Ocean, a member of the British group Big Flame.172 Big Flame had been founded in Liverpool in 1970, though by 1973 they had a presence in many parts of England. Like STO, Big Flame took inspiration from the Italian movements highlighted by the Hot Autumn, and, again like STO, Big Flame focused its work in factories. Thus it was understandable that the two groups would establish contact despite the distance between them. For Big Flame, STO as a group was important because it was “the biggest of its kind (our kind) in the States.”173
Nonetheless, the visitor was not overly impressed with STO’s theory or its practice. In a sometimes harshly critical report to Big Flame, the author excoriates STO for “being dominated by an informal hierarchy” and for lacking an educational program for new members. “The internal life of the group,” according to the report, “is consequently full of problems—administratively, politically and personally.” One such problem concerned the limitations of STO’s heavy emphasis on workplace organizing. As the author notes, “The group also has problems understanding any political practice not tied to the workplace. They have no perspective (apart from a possible verbal acknowledgement) on community struggle. There is no understanding of the totality of capitalist oppression—sex roles, the family, personal relations—and therefore the need for socialists to have a total theory and practice, taking in all aspects of capitalist society.” Although STO would eventually develop some theoretical and practical insights into this nexus, the issue would recur over the years, as described in Chapter Six.
The biggest concern expressed in the Big Flame report had to do with STO’s problems in understanding its own role in workplace struggles. Despite STO’s interest in questions of autonomy, the report argues that “although they’ve heard of the concept of autonomy, they haven’t yet learned how to use it.” Focusing on the early influence of C.L.R. James within the group, the report echoes some of the criticisms offered by “The Crisis”: “there is no process or dynamic involved” in STO’s conception of workers, “no dialectic which pushes the working class forward,” leaving only the prospect of spontaneous revolutionary upsurge. On one level, this critique seems inattentive to the complexities of the dual consciousness theory that was then jostling for position within STO with the Jamesian “seeds of socialism” analysis, since dual consciousness as articulated by Hamerquist did at least imply a dialectical interplay between the bourgeois and proletarian aspects of workers’ self-understanding.
Nonetheless, in practical terms, the report to Big Flame was not far off the mark. In the absence of any developed conception of autonomy, claims the report, “they fall back on the Leninist model of the party leading and educating the class, which adds further to their confusion, because it then becomes impossible to understand the dialectic between organization and spontaneity.” Of course, to the extent that “The Crisis” advocated an unambiguous embrace of traditional Leninist strategy, Big Flame was even less sympathetic to this alternative. At the level of activity, the report points out that “any strategy is really based on exemplary action, that is [STO] trying to establish these [independent workplace] groups, and then in some kind of confused way handing them over to the workers.” From the perspective of “The Crisis,” the solution to this was intra-union reform efforts, but Big Flame shared with STO an extra-union perspective. Instead, the report seems to identify the source of the problem in the more general difficulty of attracting non-politicized workers to any sort of permanent left workplace structure. The only solution implied is the development and application of working-class autonomy, although it is not clear exactly how the author believed this would help resolve STO’s difficulties.
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Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Don Hamerquist also drafted a paper for the Thanksgiving conference, and while his contribution was not able to prevent the “Crisis” split, it did challenge some prevailing attitudes within the group while attempting to address some of the issues later noted in the report to Big Flame. “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” directly acknowledges the sorts of difficulties the Westside branch had experienced in challenging the former and establishing the latter. In attempting to explain these problems, Hamerquist turns not to a criticism of his own theory of dual consciousness, but to an assessment of two underexamined factors: the flexibility of the trade unions and the instability of the independent, revolutionary, mass workplace organizations that STO championed. The unions, for their part, are not irreparably corrupt, as the group had previously tended to assume. According to Hamerquist, the organization’s earlier writings on production work suggest “that the US trade unions cannot absorb a major insurgency because they are so corrupt that they cannot and will not even handle the routine defense of their members’ interests. The evidence does not support this assumption.”174 As examples, he points to the AFL’s recuperation of the CIO upsurge of the thirties, the British trade unions’ cooptation of the militant shop stewards’ movement of the middle twentieth century, and most intriguingly, the success of the Italian trade unions in absorbing the factory assemblies popularized during the Hot Autumn of 1969. The source of this flexibility has to do with the nature of the trade unions themselves. Whereas STO had previously argued that “unions are basically just a police arm of the employer that is given some legitimacy by workers’ illusions,” Hamerquist maintains that “The general function of trade unions is not the suppression of class struggle, it is the containment of it within the framework of capital. The conservative role of unions is not typically manifested through their becoming an immediate barrier to the initiation of struggle, but through their mediation of the struggle to prevent it from developing in revolutionary directions.”175 In other words, the problems of the Westside branch, for instance, resulted at least in part from the somewhat responsive character of the UAW at Melrose, when STO had been expecting a more obviously regressive union like the IBEW locals at the Hawthorne Works or Stewart-Warner.
As for the independent organization model, the solution to challenges like those faced by the Westside entailed an acknowledgement of the limitations of these organizations, which the document refers to as “workers’ councils” despite their obvious differences from the traditional meaning of this term. Specifically, it was important to view them as inherently unstable, especially when confronting the hegemonic position of the established trade unions. Because consciousness is developed in the course of struggle, the independent organizations were expected to be small and primarily focused on reflection and communication among militant workers. “But even at the abnormal moments,” claims Hamerquist, “so long as the struggles are isolated and sporadic, the council will be narrower than the total constituency of the struggle. We will have to go further along the road to revolution before councils will or can become the legitimate and organic mode of self-organization of the class even in the most developed instances.”176 Short of a broadly revolutionary situation, independent organizations could have only the most limited success in drawing in masses of workers, in part because, in an isolated workplace conflict, they would, at best, function as less corrupt and more militant unions.
In many ways, “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” can be seen as an attempted compromise with the faction that produced the “Crisis” document. In particular, Hamerquist specifically acknowledges the immediate value to workers of responsive unions: “Since there is a valid role for trade unions short of a revolutionary situation, and since the potential for revitalizing US unions cannot be written off, it would be absolutely wrong for communists to regard the trade unionist sentiment within the independent organization as reactionary.”177 At the same time, however, the intra-union approach advocated in “The Crisis” is still rejected, albeit in a more cautious way than before: “In no way should we put ourselves in a position of opposition to union reform. What we can do is try to explain why that is not our priority.”178
