the “Crisis” split went forward regardless.
At the same time, Hamerquist’s reflections indicated a growing awareness, common throughout the radical left as the seventies advanced, that a revolution was no longer on the immediate horizon. STO was hardly the only organization during this period to suffer acrimonious splits and frustrating organizing setbacks. The sixties were over, the mass movements of that decade had dissipated instead of intensifying, and in every corner revolutionaries were struggling to grapple with the proper strategy for changing times. Similar considerations may have motivated the departure of the “Crisis” faction as well. Kingsley Clarke was a new member of STO at the time, and he recalls Goldfield and others arguing “that STO had no influence either in the communist movement or in the workers’ movement by virtue of its ultra-left position on independent organizations in the workplace, and that we had better get on board with October League, the New Communist Movement, because they were gaining greatly and we should be moving in that direction.”179 Hamerquist’s strategy for dealing with the organization’s difficulties was fundamentally different, but he too defended the need for a revolutionary organization that could help catalyze workers’ struggles in a nonrevolutionary situation.
But just when the organization believed it had moved beyond the real crisis precipitated by the “Crisis” document, another dissenting faction emerged. These were the “workerists” who had been criticized in “The Crisis”: advocates of complete integration with the working class, they challenged the need for a separate organization of communist militants constructed on the Leninist model. Led by two experienced labor organizers of Polish descent and Argentine upbringing, Guillermo Brzotowski and Elias Zwierzynski, this faction argued that STO’s proper role was to be a service organization to workers, not a leading body of any kind. In line with this analysis, they proposed renaming the Insurgent Worker the Workers’ Toolbox.180 From their perspective, Hamerquist’s reflections in “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations” conceded too much to the worst aspects of the “Crisis” document. This didn’t necessarily mean the “workerists” were opposed to trade union work, however. Since their whole approach involved direct immersion in working-class struggles, and because these struggles often took place within the unions, many of the people in this faction took a position on stewardship and the trade unions that was strikingly similar to that outlined by “The Crisis.”
In the summer of 1974, less than one year after the departure of the “Crisis” faction, the “workerists” produced their own lengthy critique of STO, a paper known as “The Head is a Balloon.” The title was a reference to the overly inflated sense of self-importance that the signers attributed to the leadership of the organization, and to its pretensions to leadership of the workers’ movement.181 This problem was only exacerbated by the “Crisis” split, since it led to a situation where, as the report to Big Flame puts it, STO “is now dominated by one or two heavies,” especially Hamerquist and Ignatin.182 “The Head is a Balloon” accused STO of “being dogmatically Leninist, and called for the dissolution of the group into a federation of autonomous work groups.”183 This restructuring was intended to serve both an ideological purpose, opening the group to the independent political perspectives of the workers themselves, and an organizational purpose, sidelining the power of the informal hierarchy. Once again, the organization was plunged into conflict, and again the outcome was a split. The cumulative result was a devastating reduction in size and influence for a group that one year before had been one of the leading left organizations in the Chicago area, at least in the arena of workplace organizing. The acrimony of these two consecutive rifts also drove away a number of individuals who were frustrated with both the slow pace of movement building and the infighting that had come to characterize STO.
In the end, perhaps a half-dozen members remained in an organization that had not long before numbered close to fifty. In a particularly poignant scene, Noel Ignatiev recalls a walk along the Indiana dunes in the summer of 1974 with Don Hamerquist and Carole Travis, the remaining founders of the organization.184 They reminisced about the experiences they had shared over the previous five years, and contemplated an uncertain future. While things had not gone as they had planned, none of them wanted to throw in the towel. They dedicated themselves to the rebuilding the Sojourner Truth Organization from the ground up, a task that they managed to accomplish in a little more than a year, as described in Chapter Four. One basis for this regroupment was a stronger emphasis on theoretical development and ideological agreement. This agreement was based on a number of principles, but one of the most important was the opposition to white supremacy as viewed through the theory of white skin privileges. An examination of the origins and development of this concept comprises the next chapter.
80 Most of the information in this section, including the two direct quotes, is derived from an unsigned article entitled simply “Wildcat at Western Electric,” Insurgent Worker, Spring 1974, 14–17, in author’s possession. Author interview with Noel Ignatiev, January 28, 2006, provided additional context.
81 “Wildcat at Western Electric,” 16. Noel Ignatiev remembered almost exactly the same phrasing during an interview in January, 2006.
82 “Western Electric: We Shall Bury You,” Insurgent Worker, May 1971, 2.
83 At the time, several members of STO were lawyers, and as a result the group exerted significant influence on the local NLG chapter, and the Labor Committee in particular. Author interview with Kingsley Clarke, July 6, 2005.
84 “Wildcat at Western Electric,” 17.
85 The classic work on Marx’s theory of history is G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000 [1978]). A valuable critique from the left of Marx’s theory (written prior to Cohen’s book) can be found in Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), especially pp. 15–54.
86 For simplicity’s sake, but contrary to some Marxist terminological approaches, I will use “working class” and “proletariat” interchangeably, and will use “industrial” as an adjective attached to either phrase to indicate factory workers in particular.
87 Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, (1850) “Part I: The Defeat of June 1848,” available online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).
88 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), Volume 1, Chapter 32. Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm (accessed September 15, 2011). This passage can be found on page 929 of the Penguin edition (1990), which translates “trained” instead of “disciplined.” Nate Holdren originally pointed me to this quotation.
89 V.I. Lenin, “On the So-Called Market Question” (1893). Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1893/market/06.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).
