For a thoughtful and idiosyncratic history of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, see Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution, Volume 3 (London: Continuum, 2004).
91 Antonio Gramsci, “Parties and Masses,” unsigned editorial in L’Ordine Nuovo, September 25, 1921, in Gramsci, Selections From Political Writings, 1921–1926 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 72.
92 For more on the French events, see Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 2002 [1970]), as well as Andree Hoyles, “The Occupation of Factories in France: May 1968,” in Ken Coates, Tony Topham, and Michael Barrett Brown, editors, Trade Union Register (London: Merlin Press, 1969). This latter essay was reprinted by STO in the early seventies as a pamphlet entitled General Strike: France 1968 (Chicago: STO, n.d.).
93 The single best source on the Hot Autumn remains Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy, 1968–1978 (London: Verso, 1990). Much of the text of this book is available online at http://libcom.org/history/states-emergency-cultures-revolt-italy-1968-1978 (accessed September 15, 2011).
94 This use of “workerism” must be distinguished from the more common English usage as (more or less) a synonym for syndicalism. The latter usage was for a time in the early seventies much more common within the New Communist Movement, and within STO. I will use “operaismo” to describe the former, and “workerism” to describe the latter.
95 On the positive response of US leftists to the Italian Hot Autumn, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Marx, Che and Mao (London: Verso, 2002), 88. For contemporaneous US responses to the Hot Autumn and the Italian far left of that era, see two issues of Radical America 5, no. 5, September/October, 1971, and 7, no. 2, March/April, 1973. For a marvelously comprehensive analysis of the theoretical universe within which the Hot Autumn erupted, including background on both Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
96 Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998 [1975]), 49–51.
97 Telephone interview with Noel Ignatiev, July 16, 2005.
98 Much of the information that follows comes from Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, “General Introduction,” in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
99 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1846), Chapter One, Part B. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).
100 See Sojourner Truth Organization, Toward a Revolutionary Party: Ideas on Strategy and Organization (Chicago: STO, 1976 [1971]). Hereafter, TARP. This pamphlet was officially signed by STO, but was largely written by Hamerquist. The full text is available online at http://sojournertruth.net/tarp.html (accessed September 15, 2011).
101 Hamerquist, “Reflections on Organizing” (1970), in Sojourner Truth Organization, Workplace Papers (Chicago: STO, 1980), 11.
102 TARP, 32. Ellipsis in original.
103 See, for example, Ted Allen, “White Supremacy in US History” (1973), in the collection Understanding and Fighting White Supremacy (Chicago: STO, 1976). This text is available online at http://www.sojournertruth.net/whitesupremushist.html (accessed September 15, 2011).
104 V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1902), available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ (accessed September 15, 2011).
105 This is sometimes portrayed as the contrast between the Lenin of What is to be Done? and the Lenin of State and Revolution, which was written in 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.
106 TARP, 13.
107 For an analysis of the conservative and corrupt character of the North American labor movement at the end of the sixties, see Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
108 For more on the IWW, see Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1998); and Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, eds., Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Verso, 2005).
109 Noel Ignatin, “Preface,” in Workplace Papers, iii.
110 Author interview with Don Hamerquist, September 14, 2006. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this document has also been lost. For more on the concept of the general strike within a wobbly context, see The General Strike for Industrial Freedom (Chicago: IWW, 1946).
111 See the unsigned Outline History of Sojourner Truth, September 1972, in Detroit Revolutionary Movements Collection, Subseries F, box 15, Reuther Library, Wayne State University. This document is available online at http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/sto.htm (accessed September 15, 2011).
112 Telephone interview with John Strucker, February 5, 2006.
113 Kathy and Lynn, “Organizing in an Electrical Plant in Chicago,” in Collective Works 1, no. 1, October 1974, 11–20. This piece pseudonymously refers to the “AC” plant, and changes the names of STO members and ex-members then working there, in order to protect the then-ongoing organizing efforts. However, the description of the plant and STO’s efforts there clearly match the descriptions offered in interviews with several former STO members, especially John Strucker, February 5, 2006.
114 This information comes largely from my interviews in 2006 with John Strucker, Don Hamerquist (who worked there for a time), and Noel Ignatiev (who never worked there).
