target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_21f7dbdd-bbee-51e3-82c2-d4bacb6804ec">3 The task of revolutionaries was to help expand the level of proletarian consciousness through participation in mass struggle, while challenging the acquiescence to bourgeois consciousness. STO believed that this process required the creation of a revolutionary party, but it rejected what it called the “Stalin model” of party building in favor of an eclectic mix of organizational ideas drawn from Lenin and, especially as the eighties arrived, from the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.
The second quintessential aspect of STO’s revolutionary theory was its analysis of white-skin privilege as a bulwark of white supremacy. A founding member of the group, Noel Ignatin (now Ignatiev), helped pioneer the concept by reframing ideas initially advanced by W.E.B. Du Bois, especially in his classic work, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. According to the theory, people identified as “white” benefit from material and psychological advantages that people of color are denied. STO argued that white workers must “actively and militantly reject their partial, selfish and counterfeit interests as part of a group which is favored in relation to blacks, on behalf of their total, broad and true interests as part of a class which is coming alive.”4 As a largely white group, STO saw its role as spurring the white working class in this direction and supporting organizing efforts emerging from black, Puerto Rican, and other nonwhite communities.
As the group moved closer to its own demise, a third key concept gained prominence within its theoretical universe: autonomy. Conceptually, autonomy was applied to a wide range of social groups—black people, other oppressed nations, women, youth, the working class as a whole. The list of those from whom autonomy must be sought and defended was similarly broad—capitalism and the state, but also trade unions, political parties, and even in many cases STO itself. This intense awareness of the need for real independence at the level of mass movements marked the final period of the group’s existence, and facilitated both high and low points in its existence. Closely tied to the theoretical focus on autonomy was a practical demand for militancy and a willingness to challenge legal boundaries in order to build a revolutionary movement. While there was a certain conceptual incoherence built into this constellation of ideas, most of STO’s clear-cut “successes” reflected a careful balance between acting as a radical pole inside broader struggles, on the one hand, and ensuring that mass movements had the freedom to determine their own trajectory. This was just as true in the factories of 1972 as it was in the antiwar protests of 1982. When STO failed—which was often—it was frequently because the balance was tipped too far in one direction or the other.
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A brief explanation of the title of this book is perhaps in order. For a long time, the working title was the unwieldy mouthful “Revolutionaries Who Tried to Think,” which was drawn from Ignatiev’s reflections on STO’s distinctiveness within the US left of its era. Eventually, Truth and Revolution was chosen both for its play on the group’s name and for the way in which it calls attention to fundamental questions of radical theory and practice. In the hands of the historical left, “truth” and “revolution” have too often had a troubled relationship. STO’s critique of Stalinism reflected the rejection of a methodology that presented the revolutionary party as the source of scientific knowledge and revolutionary truth. Much more recently, Hamerquist has called for “organizational forms that are mobile and flexible, and that are looking to intervene, not because they have the truth, but as a part of the development of the will to create new truths.”5 At the same time, STO itself was sometimes less than saintly in its own attempts to demarcate the supposed truth of its own positions. “Truth” is a difficult and complicated idea to define, but it is precisely this complexity and ambiguity that make the term apt as a bookend with “revolution” when conceptualizing the history of STO.6 The chapters that follow address questions of truth only obliquely, but contemporary revolutionaries have much to gain in viewing STO through the dual prism suggested by the title.
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This book covers a lot of terrain. It describes events that took place during three different decades, in locations all over the world, from Chicago, New York, and Kansas City to Puerto Rico, Italy, and Iran. While focusing on the specific trajectory of a single, small organization, it attempts to shed light on the broader history of the international revolutionary left over the last half century. STO was both exemplary and exceptional when considered in the context of the movements that emerged from the end of the sixties. It grappled with a set of problems that were nearly universal—the contradictions of race and class, the failure of revolutionary struggles to establish or maintain free and egalitarian societies, the need to incorporate the work of conscious revolutionaries into mass struggles, and so forth. Yet its proposals for dealing with these problems were proudly unorthodox, drawing on a range of sources in the Marxist, revolutionary nationalist, feminist, and other radical traditions. While claiming the mantle of Leninism, STO diverged sharply from most standard interpretations of that term.
In the pages that follow, I attempt to balance an intellectual history of STO’s theoretical innovations with a social history of the group’s real world activities. This task is, of course, more easily identified than accomplished, in part because the available written materials (both published and internal) tend to focus on theory at the expense of practice. Oral history interviews with former members only partially redressed this imbalance. But for me, as for STO, it remains a fundamental premise that ideas can only obtain their value, and indeed their validation, in the messy world in which we actually live. As a result, in addition to discussions of consciousness and white skin privilege and autonomy, these pages include stories of getting, keeping, and losing jobs, reflections on popular music and spectator sports, descriptions of protests and conferences, and commentary on organizational questions that may on first glance seem needlessly obscure. The goal is not to be eclectic, but to be true to the complex life of any revolutionary group. Considered as a whole, the historical arc of the Sojourner Truth Organization has much to teach contemporary radicals, especially those aspiring to be revolutionaries who try to think as well as act. This book is intended as a modest contribution to the creation of a framework for moving forward by looking closely at a small slice of the past.
1 The latter phrase comes from the standard US translation of the lyrics to the “Internationale,” and was also part of the title of an STO pamphlet from the mid-seventies, “…no condescending saviors” by Noel Ignatin. The full stanza is:
We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgment hall,
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all:
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell,
We must ourselves decide our duty,
We must decide, and do it well.
2 The source of this term, in its usage by STO, is somewhat murky. Gramsci discusses the hypothetical worker as having “two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness).” Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 333. W.E.B. Du Bois used the phrase “double consciousness” in his classic work The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1995 [1903]), 45, to describe the experience of black people living in a white supremacist society. Despite the group’s obvious debt to Du Bois, there is no clear evidence that his work was the source of STO’s usage. Don Hamerquist, who first introduced the term within STO, recalls Lenin’s critique of trade union consciousness as an important influence in how the organization
