Michael Staudenmaier - Truth and Revolution, Sojourner Truth Organization (2012)

Michael Staudenmaier: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the latest event for the Harazin-Moore Lecture Series on the Sojourner Truth Organization. We have a new book called Truth and Revolution, and Michael Stoudemire, I believe— Yep. —is going to talk to us about it, and there will be time for questions, and books are on sale in the back. So let's give him a round of applause. Hi everybody, thanks for coming. Um, first I wanted to say that it is, uh, sort of personally exciting to be the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series because I now think of myself as a historian, and that trajectory I think probably began in some ways when my brother gave me one of the like first editions of People's History in like 1986 or something like that. Read it. Read it, loved it, and I've shifted in a lot of ways obviously since then, but It's still sort of an important moment in my life. I wanted to start today, first of all, by, I guess, a slightly somber note. One thing that was a sort of repeated aspect of my experience of working on this book from 2005 until this year is that a number of people that were either important to my research or important to STO or important to me personally have passed away.

Speaker 3: Oh.

Michael Staudenmaier: And there's too many to really list, but I did want to sort of mention 3 of them specifically. One is my mom, who passed away 2 and a half years ago, and the book is dedicated to her. The second one—

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Michael Staudenmaier: —is a woman named Jara Greenwald, who was a sort of cultural production artist, radical, amazing person, and was the partner of my friend Josh McPhee, who did the design for the COVID Who passed away this winter. And the third one is a guy that some people in this room I think are familiar with, Joel Olson, who passed away this spring, who was a guy that I had known since the 1990s and was very important in sort of passing along the legacy of the Sojourner Truth Organization, of which neither he nor I was ever a member, but he was part of that process.

Speaker 5: Wow.

Michael Staudenmaier: I can tell you a little bit about myself. I'm 39 years old. I was radicalized as a teenager, started calling myself an anarchist in the mid to late '80s. I— the sort of first Gulf War in '90, '91, and the Rodney King riots in '92 were kind of pivotal moments for me as a younger person. I am still an anarchist.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Michael Staudenmaier: As an anarchist over the years, I would say the The bulk of my political activity has been focused in some way around the opposition to white supremacy, often either in an anti-imperialist or an anti-fascist mode, if you will. I am a fairly new member of a fairly new and small group called the First of May Anarchist Alliance. I am also a husband and a father of 2 young kids, one of whom is off in that corner.

Speaker 5: Hi.

Michael Staudenmaier: He's my executive assistant on my little book tour. And as I said, the book was about 7 years in the making, from 2005 until now, and it was literally just arrived back from the printers about a week and a half ago. So this may be its first arrival in Boston, I believe. And after about 15 years as Somebody out in the working world, I returned to the academy and last fall started a PhD program in U.S. history. So the STO book was prior to all of that, but in some ways kind of led me to decide that I did want to go back and study history. So what I'm going to do tonight, I recognize that I'm here as part of a lecture series. I have less of a lecture and more of a reading, and I'd like to engage in— Questions. Some kind of dialogue after that reading. So I'll tell you, uh, first a little bit of background about the Sojourner Truth Organization, um, and then I have 3 readings that I'm going to do, uh, the first of which draws from the introduction to the book, uh, and talks about the sort of ambitions of the book, and also from the opening vignette of one of the first kind of meaty chapters that talks about STO's workplace organizing activities in the early 1970s. Second reading is going to be focused on kind of theoretical debate inside STO in the early to mid-'70s around the concept of white skin privilege, which was, as probably everybody knows, was central to STO's political trajectory. I'll talk a little bit more about that. And that contradiction, the way I've been phrasing it, is that it was a contradiction That pitted concepts of communism, and I mean that with a small c, not a sort of capital C communism, and the concept of autonomy on the other side of that set of contradictory concepts. Right. And I'll try to unpack that a little bit more as I go through the readings. And then the third reading will be from the conclusion, which is about the legacy of STO in the present moment. And that reading will focus specifically on questions of sort of mass activity and legality and illegality that I think are especially timely in a sort of post-Occupy world. So a little bit about the Sojourner Truth Organization. It was a small revolutionary group that was founded in Chicago in 1969, at the very end of 1969, and existed in one form or another until sometime around 1986 or so.

Speaker 5: Wow.

Michael Staudenmaier: It was named for a woman named Sojourner Truth, who's probably familiar to everybody, but just in case, she was a former slave and radical feminist of the 19th century who advocated both against white supremacy and against patriarchy. The group was largely based in Chicago pretty much throughout its existence, but after about 1974, it had members in a variety of places from coast to coast at different points in time.

Speaker 5: Hi.

Michael Staudenmaier: The group always identified itself as a Leninist organization, but what it meant by that, as we'll sort of discuss in some of these readings, was in a lot of ways profoundly different from what just about any other group of Leninists meant by that term then or now. They focused heavily in terms of theory on a couple of key concepts. One of those concepts is class consciousness and a specific idea that STO developed that they called dual consciousness. It doesn't come up much in the readings that I'm going to do tonight, but I'm happy to talk about it in the discussion period. Second one is a heavy emphasis on white supremacy and the concept of white skin privilege. And the third is the concept of autonomy, which was a kind of large and unwieldy thing in the same way that it is for a lot of people on the left today. And I will again try to unpack a little bit of what STO meant by autonomy at the time. Okay. As a concept in the course of these readings. And then the 4th kind of key theoretical notion was what STO described as the rejection of bourgeois legality as a framework for political action. So that was in some ways a theoretical insight, but in many ways was a sort of pivot over to strategy and action. And in terms of strategy and action, STO's areas of work were many and varied over the course of its existence in ways that some people criticized as being eclectic. I think it provides an interesting way to view the broader trajectory of the revolutionary left over a longer period of time because STO was actively involved in so many different things. But key ones among those many areas of work included a lot of factory organizing in the early 1970s, an active period of anti-imperialist solidarity in the later 1970s, especially around the Puerto Rican independence movement. But also in solidarity with Iranian radicals active against the Shah prior to the 1979 revolution, and a lot of solidarity with revolutionary Black nationalist groupings as well during that period. And then the other sort of major area in its later years was a lot of emphasis placed on active engagement with new social movements. So that was everything from Anti-nuclear struggles to anti-fascist efforts, some youth and student organizing, a lot of feminist, especially reproductive rights activity. A whole range of things sort of fell into that category in the later years of STO's existence. A phrase that I often go back to, and I think this comes out in the very first reading, is to say that STO was both exceptional and exemplary. In its context. And I'll get into a little bit more of what I mean by that in the very first reading. So the first reading is from— again, it's sort of cobbled together from 2 spots. So this is the last couple of paragraphs of the introduction and then the first few pages of the 2nd chapter. This book covers a lot of terrain. It describes events that took place during 3 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 1960s. 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 in 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 that I conducted with numerous 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 supremacy 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.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Michael Staudenmaier: 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 to 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. And then from the beginning of chapter 2. In the fall of 1973, A 6-day-long wildcat strike took place at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois. About 150 men, mainly Black and Latino, refused to work in the twister department of the cable plant where telephone cables were wound together by machine. Although the strikers were officially members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW, they viewed the union with total disdain because of its cozy relationship with the company. When the company laid off several employees and told the remaining workers that they would need to pick up the slack, union officials counseled the men to accept the changes while their complaints were investigated. No doubt thinking of the many accidents caused by previous management speedups, the workers instead decided to shut down the department and walk out. The strikers organized themselves well, and in addition to demanding a reduction in the workload back to its previous level, the removal of a racist foreman, the creation of a rest area near their department and access to better medical facilities, they also demanded a permanent negotiating committee for the department elected by the workers to deal directly with the company when grievances arose, thus bypassing the union altogether. The men elected a temporary negotiating committee made up of one Black and one Latino worker from each shift, and they immediately established a picket line to raise plant-wide awareness of their actions. The company was willing to meet with the negotiating committee, but no concessions were forthcoming, and the workers were told to return to work by the following week or be fired en masse. IBEW officials told the workers their strike was illegal and that no aid would come from the union if the walkout didn't end by the company's stated deadline. A total of 26,000 workers were employed at the massive facility, And in living memory, there had never been any sort of organized work stoppage at the plant, whether authorized or wildcat. Given the minuscule numbers in the twister department, the strike was hardly major news to the outside world. For much of Chicago's left, however, the implications were significant. The walkout was seen as more evidence of the growing militancy of workers in heavy industry and as a prime opportunity to distribute radical literature and and potentially recruit new members. But there was a problem. The strikers weren't interested. As one worker explained, quote, we don't want any communists, socialists, movies, raps, leaflets, newspapers, newspaper interviews, photographs, lectures, or anything else, end quote. Most Marxist organizations viewed this sort of rejection as a kind of working-class anti-communism and abandoned the struggle in frustration. One of the only left groups that established ongoing communication with the strikers was the Sojourner Truth Organization, which had been observing the Hawthorne Works since at least May 1971. That month, the first issue of The Insurgent Worker, which was STO's agitational newspaper for a number of years in the early '70s, focused heavily on problems there. And in an editorial provocatively boldly entitled Western Electric, We Shall Bury You, opined that, quote, if there is any crime against the working people for which Western Electric can escape responsibility, we have not been able to discover it, end quote. 2 years later, when the Twister Department workers asked the Labor Committee of the Chicago branch of the National Lawyers Guild, or NLG, for advice on the legality of the strike, several STO members on the committee were able to establish contact with the strikers. The men accepted both legal assistance and an offer to print leaflets on STO's press. According to one STO member, quote, in this situation, one in which we had no direct influence, we felt the best we could do was to ready ourselves to help execute any plans the workers would come up with, putting our full resources and ideas at their disposal if they desired, end quote. 10,000 leaflets written by the strikers and printed by STO, were distributed to other workers at the plant. And having received some key legal advice from the NLG Labor Committee, the men found themselves negotiating from a position of strength. After 6 days, and with the pressure building, the company management agreed to every one of the workers' demands, but in exchange, they required that the men stop discussing the situation with their coworkers. Unfortunately, this code of silence proved to be the undoing of the strike gains, as the company proceeded to transfer the most militant workers, including the original members of the Permanent Negotiating Committee, to other departments and otherwise disrupt the momentum gained from the immediate victory. Having deliberately accepted the limits the men placed on outside involvement in the strike, STO could only stand by and watch this final act play out. Despite its assessment that broad solidarity efforts, both within the factory and outside it, were the only chance for long-term success in the plant. There are literally hundreds of stories much like this one describing various workplace interventions made by the Sojourner Truth Organization during the early 1970s. In this case, the course of events reflects both what STO had in common with other groups— an emphasis on organizing at the point of production— And what made the group unique? An intense commitment to the autonomy of workers in struggle. And at that point, the chapter goes on to describe some of those other instances and also a number of the sort of theoretical and strategic arguments that went into that process. The second reading shifts, if you will, from practice to theory. So in the first reading, I think, especially in that vignette, you can get a sense of what I was describing before as the kind of contradiction between communism and autonomy as it played out in STO. And in this instance, autonomy clearly won the day as far as STO's decision-making was concerned, um, and the group sort of went along with supporting, uh, this insurgency of workers despite serious political reservations about the structure of the workers' project. The second reading focuses more internally On a set of debates inside of STO around the development of the concept of white skin privilege, which was one of the sort of key conceptual ideas that STO advanced over the course of its existence, and gives a flavor of how that concept came to be sort of concretized and how different versions came to be sort of— Debated. Assessed and either accepted or rejected inside the group. And it's important to note the very first sentence mentions a pamphlet that I won't otherwise talk about that was another pamphlet STO produced in the early '70s called The United Front Against Imperialism? So just so you know, that's what that is when I get to it right here in the first sentence. If the United Front Against Imperialism represented SCO's official program in regard to white supremacy, another document attempted to flesh out the subjective aspects of this program in the context of working-class life. This document was a speech given by Noel Ignatian, now Noel Ignatieff, in 1972 to a group of student radicals in Portland, Oregon. Originally untitled and subsequently known as Black Worker, White Worker, the talk is peppered with real-life examples of race relations in the steel mills and in other heavy industry settings. It takes these seemingly isolated vignettes and weaves them into a thoughtful examination of the complexities and contradictions of white supremacy and resistance to it in a working-class context. Thus, for example, Ignatian describes a large farm equipment manufacturing plant in Chicago where, quote, a black worker was being tried out for a repair job on an assembly line. The foreman had been harassing the man, trying to disqualify him during his 3-day trial period.

Speaker 6: That's right.

Michael Staudenmaier: After 2 days of this, the majority of workers on the line, black and white, walked off their jobs demanding that the man be accepted for his job. The company backed down and work resumed. Later on, some of the same white workers took part in racist demonstrations at a Chicago high school. The demonstrations were called against overcrowding in an attempt to keep out several hundred black students who who had been transferred to the school as a result of redistricting. Fully aware of the historical resonance, Ignatian characterizes this internal conflict as a civil war in the mind of the white worker. The 2 sides in this conflict are, on the one hand, the drive to reorganize society so that they, the workers, become the masters of production instead of the servants of production, the essential meaning of socialism. That's right. And, on the other hand, the selfish pragmatism of the white-skinned privileged system. The task for white revolutionaries is to demonstrate to white workers the contradiction between these 2 worldviews and to encourage the embrace of the former and the rejection of the latter. In this context, quote, the daily activities of Black people, especially the Black workers, are the best existing model for the aspirations of workers generally as a distinct class of people. Thus, there is a direct correlation between resistance to white supremacy and the push toward working-class self-emancipation, because the activities of the black workers are the most advanced outpost of the new society we seek to establish. Indeed, white revolutionaries must understand, and help the masses of white workers to understand, that the interests of the entire working class can only be served by standing firmly with Black workers, end quote. Ignatius' speech deliberately focuses on real-world examples where the perceived interests of workers, read white workers, conflict with the efforts of Black people to improve their position in society. Only in situations like these can white workers be forced to make a decision between stark alternatives: fighting to defend the small gains that separate them from even more exploited Black workers. Or abandoning their own privileges in order to make common cause with Black workers fighting for equality on the shop floor. Revolutionaries who accept this approach clearly have their work cut out for them. Ignatian readily agrees that this is not the most optimistic scenario. The course I advocate offers great difficulties, no doubt about it. It is likely that the repression directed against a radical group that relentlessly fought racial discrimination would be greater than that against a more moderate group. I freely concede all the difficulties, but then, he concludes, reasonably enough, whoever said that making a revolution was easy? End quote. In the end, Ignatius Portland's speech represented a high point in STO's efforts to grapple with the contradictions and opportunities of life within a capitalist and white supremacist society. Today, the speech is one of the best-known publications associated with STO, having been reprinted and widely distributed over the years by radical groups such as Anti-Racist Action. Nonetheless, its initial circulation inside STO prompted a contentious debate within the group around the version of white skin privilege analysis that it contained. Not long after the talk was given, the text was proposed to STO's literature committee for distribution as, quote, a mass pamphlet that formalized our strategy for the struggle against white supremacy, end quote. The committee unanimously rejected this proposal in a 2-page document entitled Critique of Noel's Portland Speech. And I should say that SDO is famous for these scintillating, really grab-you kind of titles. Critique of Noel's Portland Speech. The committee argued both that, quote, the paper projects a moralistic and unprogrammatic approach to the fight against white supremacy, and And that its conceptualization of socialism and how to win it is untenable in a document of a Leninist organization committed to a Leninist strategy for socialist revolution. The first argument, that the Portland speech was moralistic and unprogrammatic, was hardly a novel criticism. The author herself noted that much of the rest of the left characterized the STO overall position on white supremacy in exactly those terms. But for these claims to be made within the group itself represented a fundamental challenge. The critique argues that Noel fails to demonstrate the immediate interests whites have in fighting against the system of white skin privileges. In particular, Ignatian ignores the contradiction in these privileges. Not only do they divide the workers in struggle over immediate class issues, but they are often disadvantages disguised as privileges. Right. Further, the line he puts forward is unprogrammatic. It requires white workers to make a commitment to socialism in order to repudiate their white skin privileges. Noel presents no program based on repudiation of concrete privileges that the white worker can be won to in the daily battles of the class struggle. Thus, the critique was not, strictly speaking, a repudiation of the white skin privilege analysis, but rather an attempt to reformulate it so that it appealed to the perceived self-interests of white workers. In this sense, the critique could be perceived as an attempt to evade the difficulties encountered in attempting to win white workers to STO's politics and strategy. The very real examples of contradictory behavior by white workers offered in the Portland speech could not be resolved simply by showing the workers these contradictions. As Ignatian maintained, quote, White working people aren't stupid. They don't act in a racist fashion simply out of blind prejudice. There are much more substantial causes, the system of white skin privileges, which lead them to behave in a selfish, exclusionary manner. Facing this problem squarely did not make Ignatian's position moralistic, but it did demand that revolutionaries avoid easy answers. The second argument advanced in the critique That Ignatian's vision of socialism and the strategy for achieving it were unworkable also represented a fundamental challenge to STO's political outlook. In its view, Ignatian rejects Lenin's argument in What Is to Be Done? that by itself the experience of workers cannot produce socialist consciousness. To Lenin's approach, Noel counterposes the gardener approach: discover the seeds of socialism in workers' self-activity. Identify them, nurture them. This approach is spontanist and syndicalist. In particular, the critique argues that Ignatius Portland's speech romanticized the revolutionary potential of the Black community. Quote, he presents Black culture as a model for the new society. He idealizes Black consciousness and the social relations among Black people. His program for fighting white supremacy Is simply for whites to recognize Black culture and the Black movement as the best expression of socialism. The obvious alternative, from the perspective of the Literature Committee, was the embrace of the traditional Leninist approach, prioritizing the ideological intervention of revolutionary cadres such that, quote, the development of this revolutionary class consciousness is the job of conscious communists armed with Marxist-Leninist theory. The 2 criticisms, the romanticization of Black culture and the rejection of the seeds of socialism analysis, must be distinguished, if for no other reason than that the former was insightful while the latter was an unthinking regurgitation of Stalinist methodology. The projection of revolutionary potential onto the Black community was indeed a problem that characterized STO throughout most of its existence. Although it was by no means the only radical group of its era to make this mistake. Even Ignatiev himself now considers this to have been one of STO's main shortcomings, lamenting the fact that the group couldn't see the difference between Black Revolution and proletarian revolution. He draws a parallel to the early IWW's failure to see the difference between industrial unionism and revolution as such. The biggest culprit here was the context of the early 1970s. Following upon 2 full decades during which every progressive movement in the United States had either emerged from or taken direct inspiration from the Black community. In this context, it is easy to see how such romanticization could have developed, although the critique was certainly correct in challenging it. On the second question, however, concerning the seeds of socialism idea, Agnewton's Portland speech holds up. Yeah. 4 decades later. A significant part of what made STO unique politically within its milieu was precisely the rejection of traditional understandings of Leninist strategy. Nonetheless, a tension always existed within STO regarding the relative importance of Leninist party-building measures and what the critique describes as the gardener approach. The critics of Ignatian's Portland speech were hardly alone in in wanting STO to develop into a Marxist-Leninist party. This objective, as has been noted previously, marked STO from its founding in late 1969. Indeed, by the mid-'70s, STO would begin to place primary emphasis on this development, although as a group it was always convinced that any such party would necessarily be led primarily by revolutionaries of color. In this context, a major factor Not just in STO, but within the entire North American left, was the prominence of Maoism and Stalinism within the Black movement. From the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to the Black Panther Party, and from the Republic of New Africa to the African People's Socialist Party, Black radical organizations of the early 1970s almost invariably aligned themselves with the Maoist tradition within Marxism. Thus, Ameed's conceptual interest in the Gardner approach was more than counterbalanced by the practical requirements of STO's efforts to combat white supremacy within the context of the new communist movement. The result, in terms of Ignatins' Portland speech, was a contradictory view of organization, one that placed a high value on both mass self-determination and Leninist cadre structures. STO's evolving perspective on this subject would oscillate over the next decade Between party building and autonomy. The tension between these 2 poles was not to be easily resolved within STO. So that gives a little bit of a flavor, I think, of some of the intellectual and internal dynamics that operated, at least at that point in time. And I think some of you are probably aware that internal political debate was a hugely important aspect of STO's self-understanding throughout its existence. And that became even more pronounced as the '70s progressed and into the 1980s. But I wanted to give that as just sort of one example of how they went about that process. So the last reading is from the conclusion. For those of you who are familiar with the work of the Marxist economist Harry Kleber, who wrote a book called Reading Capital Politically, The conclusion is entitled Reading STO Politically. Connecting all of STO's diverse experiences was a sort of real-world revolutionary pragmatism that did not always track with its seemingly unshakable theoretical commitments. While this tension opened the door to criticisms of the group's practical work as needlessly eclectic, there are actually any number of themes that connect a wide range of activities undertaken over the better part of 2 decades. Most of these have less to do with theory than they do with revolutionary strategy. Questions of mass action and illegality, of internationalism and anti-imperialism, of anti-fascism, feminism, popular culture, and the central role of class struggle all present themselves when considering the contemporary value of STO. And I should say that the— that a big part of the conclusion is Uh, involves sort of addressing each of those in turn. The section I'm about to read addresses really only the first 2, mass action and illegality. The group's longstanding emphasis on mass action and illegality was directly connected to the notion that proletarian consciousness emerges in the context of struggle, and especially direct action. There was an almost mystical aspect to this analysis, with more than a touch of Frantz Fanon's ecstatic embrace Of the transformative qualities of revolutionary violence.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Michael Staudenmaier: For SDO, however, the key was not necessarily violence, though the group always rejected pacifism, but rather the need to move beyond the confines of bourgeois legality. The mystical element was also related to a millenarian outlook that was perpetually anticipating the next, and possibly, hopefully, final upsurge, whether in the factories or emerging from within new social movements. Even during periods of low ebb, the group was convinced that mass struggles would return. It was only a question of when. On the one hand, this approach led many of the group's most enthusiastic members to burn out and leave in disillusionment when the hoped-for moment of upsurge continued to be put off. At the same time, it was precisely this constant attentiveness to new motion that allowed STO to engage at the earliest stages of multiple struggles. The trick for contemporary radicals, of course, is to balance these 2 aspects, to avoid burnout without missing the boat when mass movements emerge, as they so often do, suddenly and in unexpected places. The revolutionary left's recent interaction with the Occupy movement presents a relevant case study. Some radicals immediately dismissed Occupy Wall Street as a liberal or populist manifestation of the sense of entitlement of bourgeois youth. While others latched on in order to aggressively push their specific organizational line.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Michael Staudenmaier: Still, there were some who quickly recognized the organic prospects for militant anti-capitalist organizing inherent in the movement. This latter tendency, including a number of organizations and individuals across the U.S. who drew direct inspiration from the legacy of STO, not to mention a few former members, successfully involved itself in some of the most exciting aspects of the Occupy phenomenon, such as the Oakland General Strike of October 2011. Considered more directly, the issue of illegality also has profound implications for revolutionary strategy. STO was highly aware of the ways in which public discussions of illegality were guaranteed to draw the attention of the repressive apparatus of both the state and of private capitalist entities. The group spent significant time researching and analyzing the contours of both forms of repression. While scrupulously trying to avoid any direct entanglements with either one. One of the small handful of STO-related documents to have been recently republished is Ken Lawrence's pamphlet, The New State Repression, which challenged many common, then and still, left assumptions about police activity in the post-COINTELPRO era. Echoing STO's general analysis, Lawrence argued that the legalistic defense of constitutional protections and civil liberties so common on the left, since the 1960s in fact undermined radical insurgencies instead of bolstering them. The same confusion around these issues that plagued the left in 1985 is ubiquitous today, and contemporary radical formations have much to learn from STO's attentiveness to illegality and repression. Another aspect here was the deliberate decision to prioritize mass and class over party. Focusing on the decisive role masses of people would play in any revolutionary upsurge. This approach became more pronounced over time, basically in tandem with the group's growing attachment to the concept of autonomy. There is incredible value today in this set of insights, especially when compared to the still-lingering legacy of what Max Elbaum has called the sect-building approach, which placed self-described vanguard parties at the center of all struggle. When contemporary movements like the Arab Spring or Occupy show the ability to emerge almost without warning, it is essential to have a framework that allows for a critical analysis of the shortcomings of such developments while still recognizing the central importance of the movements themselves. This was the approach taken, for instance, by a loose network of STO-inspired groups and individuals who participated actively in Occupy across the U.S. Critical reflections from a range of revolutionary perspectives were collected in the pamphlet Hella Occupy that was produced in December of 2011. One common manifestation of the support for mass action is the uncritical perspective that has sometimes been called movementism, essentially the belief that social movements are entirely self-directing and that there is no value, or even negative value, in attempting to critically intervene within them as conscious revolutionaries. This viewpoint is in large part a result of a proper rejection of the sect-building model, but it bends the stick too far in the opposite direction. While STO consistently rejected this sort of approach and always emphasized the need to interact critically with any social struggle, it is not hard to see the line that leads from certain STO positions to movementism. The creation of what has been termed the nonprofit industrial complex has also been part of the problem to the extent that NGOs routinely impose limits on forms of struggle and in particular the demand for legality. Additionally, there is a deeper difficulty of attempting to develop revolutionary momentum in an era where mass movements of any sort are few and far between, the sudden rise of Occupy notwithstanding. This was partly the cause of the decline of STO itself. As the movements that emerged from the '60s receded and the organization became something of a fish out of water. Unfortunately, it is not clear that STO's strategic perspective on the importance of mass struggles provides any clear lessons that can solve this continuing problem. STO was always better at creating a pole within already existing movements than it was at catalyzing new ones. What to make of STO in the final analysis. Noel Ignatieff once described the group to me as, quote, an organization of revolutionaries that tried to think, end quote. On one level, this may seem one-sided insofar as it focuses on the thinking rather than the doing aspect of the process, but perhaps we should think of revolutionaries as those who actually attempt to make revolution rather than simply those who profess its value in the abstract. Seen from this angle, the '70s left was peppered with organizations that tried to make revolutions, and it was the attempt to reflect critically on that process that made STO unusual. John Garvey, a close comrade of STO for many years, argues that in spite of many flaws, quote, STO remains the single most remarkable organization of its era, end quote. Hopefully this book, at the very least, has adequately demonstrated what made it remarkable, both for better and for worse. On the other hand, Mario Tronti, a veteran of the Italian autonomous Marxist current that so influenced STO, reflected on his own milieu by claiming that it produced, quote, many flowers, little fruit, end quote.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Michael Staudenmaier: This seems in some ways a helpful metaphor for understanding STO, if we think of flowers as valuable insights And fruit as lasting practical outcomes. No matter how remarkable STO may have been, today's radicals are largely tasked with reinventing the wheel of revolutionary struggle, as have so many earlier generations. That's it. I'm happy to answer any questions, engage in dialogue, get people's perspectives. I guess probably it might be easiest to begin if anybody has any clarifying questions, things they didn't quite get. I know that was a lot of material, and a lot of it comes in the form of the book with previous explanatory notes or footnotes, that sort of thing. Yes?

Speaker 5: I would say a couple of significant aspects of Lenin's program that you reject now, the STO rejects.

Michael Staudenmaier: I would say the way that it was often phrased was that STO thought of itself as a group of state and revolution Leninists rather than what is to be done Leninists. And what really, I think, was the norm was not so much that they would articulate a specific set of critical— of rejections of Leninist precepts, as much as they would say, the rest of you all have it wrong. Lenin didn't actually believe X, Y, and Z. And if we If we think that he did, he only believed it in 1902, and by 1917 he changed his mind. And that was sort of their line of reasoning. One of the things that I criticize a little bit in a different section of the conclusion is the almost fetishistic attachment that SDO felt to Leninism, as it led them into these sorts of debates where they were, you know, it's the yet to be sort of predictable cycle of who can quote which obscure set of Lenin's writings. So I don't know if that answers your question, but I would say it wasn't so much that they thought they were rejecting anything inside Leninism as that they thought they were upholding some true Leninism against all the other deviations, which I think was also a fairly common stance that was taken by almost every other group of that era in that milieu, in the New Communist movement and Yes. I have 2 questions.

Speaker 7: One is, did they actively seek to recruit people, and if so, how? And secondly— in other words, did they—

Michael Staudenmaier: were they—

Speaker 7: did they see themselves as building a party? And secondly, what kind of process did they use for decision-making, like consensus or democratic centralism? I think it was a democratic centralism.

Michael Staudenmaier: Etc. In terms of the first, STO from the very start thought of itself as a sort of pre-party formation, but again, always believed that the party was necessarily, if it was going to reflect the class, would have to be emerging from the coming together of multiple organizations, especially what it saw as sort of Leading revolutionary nationalist organizations have overwhelmingly made up of people of color. So in that sense, it had this kind of ambivalent response to the idea of recruitment. It wanted to self-perpetuate. It wanted to keep growing. It felt that it had important things to say. But at the same time, it was always sort of shy about trying to get new people to sort of buy the line for a couple of reasons. One, a big one is that that Was sort of a stumbling block to their vision of what autonomy meant. So at different points this was more accentuated than at others, but a lot of the time STO felt like autonomy needed to be autonomy not only from bad guys but also from the self-proclaimed good guys. And that included not only labor unions and sort of self-declared vanguard parties, but also You know, groups like STO that thought they knew what was best, and maybe they were wrong. So autonomy created this conflict inside the group, and that's one of the sort of arguments that I draw throughout the book, that I think limited the group's ability to recruit and its— in fact, its desire to recruit. In terms of decision-making, the group never used any sort of consensus model, as far as I'm aware. It always identified itself with a sort of majoritarian system. It was very fond of drawing lines of division, creating debate that could draw out differences, and then through that process come to forms of agreement on the basis of majority rule. There is a part in the book where I describe the same way as I mentioned earlier about sort of general proposition of defending what it thought was true Leninism, an engagement where it defended what it thought was the true meaning of democratic centralism.

Speaker 5: Right.

Michael Staudenmaier: Right. Against people who had a much more traditional, fairly standard vision of democratic centralism that we might associate today. At the same time, that changed over time, I would say, and by the early 1980s, there were a lot of other things at play, and I would say it probably doesn't make sense to describe the group as being democratic centralist in any way after a certain point. There were a number of people who I did interviews with who said they would have never described the group in that way. But it's pretty clear from a number of documents, at least as late as the mid to late '70s, that that was a key part of its self-understanding.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I guess still clarifying questions.

Speaker 3: Just kind of demographics. I was wondering if you could give us a sense of the numbers that were involved in this organization at different times, and if you could offer a little thoughts or observations on the demographics of that, of course including, you know, the issues of race and gender, but also issues of students, university people who, you know, people who had been from the kind of SDS conjuncture, you know, kind of Vietnam era versus other. What events, if there were, you know, if you could describe to some extent the kind of waves, you know, if there were moments of where there was more recruitment or more people attracted to the organization?

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: And then a second question would be, I'm really interested in this communist autonomy contradiction, and I wondered if you could— if when you think about that within SDO, are there particular individuals or parts of the country that tended maybe towards one side of that dynamic, that contradiction, than the others, more towards the autonomy, more towards the communists?

Michael Staudenmaier: And just things I could read to follow up to kind of get a sense of this. Sure.

Speaker 3: This debate as it played out?

Michael Staudenmaier: Sure. In terms of demographics, the group was always small. That's— I think it's sort of overwhelming demographic reality was that it was tiny. You know, I feel slightly guilty having written a book about a group that probably, I think, never had more than 90 members, probably, at any given time, when there are much larger groups that don't have their own books. But I think it wasn't about size. It was about the value of what the group contributed. Contributed. It was overwhelmingly white throughout its existence, exclusively white at different points in time. Interestingly, at its founding, there were a couple of members of color, and there was a vision very early on of STO as a multiracial organization. And that's part of what led to the choice of the name Sojourner Truth for the— The name of the organization. Probably it was never— I don't think it was ever, like, 50/50 men/women, but maybe 60/40 men/women, something like that. Not as bad a gender ratio as a lot of groups that I've seen in my own personal experience. And that carried through to leadership levels pretty consistently, although the group never had any sort of quota system. For women in leadership. It was an interesting mix of people who had varying levels of university background. And one thing that's sort of notable about it that I mentioned at one point is that there was a sort of constant presence of what people called the heavies, who were the kind of intellectual leading lights of the organization, who often formed a sort of informal hierarchy. Those people tended to have substantially less formal education than a sort of second layer of intellectually engaged members, who often tended to be from professional backgrounds. Mm-hmm. As I said in the first section, there were a number of lawyers who were members at different points. At the same time, there were a number of people who, you know, dropped out of school at varying points in time to get jobs in the factories and stuck with that. Some of them went back to school or back to academic posts after deindustrialization, and burnout stripped them of that sort of line of work. So I think that's sort of— oh, I guess in terms of age, it was generally relatively young. There was certainly a sort of core, including that group of heavies, that aged with the group, and then it was sort of perpetually regenerated with younger members. And I'd say in terms of Your second question around questions of communism and autonomy and how that played out. One thing that I think was a pattern is that the older— not necessarily older, older, but more long-established members in a lot of cases tended to opt for communism, tended to opt for let's advance a specific line, we spent a lot of time developing it. Right. And that included some of the heavies who helped develop that line in the first place. Whereas a lot of the younger members, especially in the later '70s and into the '80s, emerged or sort of came out of broadly anti-authoritarian social movements and perhaps had some exposure to anarchism or to other kind of visions of opposition to things like democratic centralism. Those people tended to opt for autonomy as a mode of engagement. But I wouldn't draw too fine a point on that, and I think it varied often from issue to issue who was on which sides, which is something that I think was notable about the group in general, was that it was— there were a number of periods where factions developed and splits occurred, but on the whole, it was not an organization where there were sort of repetitive—

Speaker 3: Right.

Michael Staudenmaier: sides that were always populated the same way. There were sort of repeated conflicts, but they'd be populated, you know, same people would be on different sides at different points. So I hope that answers to some extent the question. I just have a—

Speaker 7: I'm sorry. I just have a question about maybe the kind of theoretical development of your research as it relates to someone like Occupy and Arab Spring. Had you finished the research before these events? And so, you know, was there a dialectic relationship between what was happening?

Michael Staudenmaier: Did things change in the book after you saw this? The conclusion changed substantially, I would say, less because of the Arab Spring and more because of Occupy. I finished the first version of the complete manuscript A year ago, right around now. And I remember people asking me, the publisher, DK, would ask me, you know, let's talk about what you think your target audience is. And I would say vague things like, you know, younger people engaged in real struggles that are sort of curious about some of their history and trying to develop a more theoretical comprehension. I don't really know who those people are, but I know they're out there. And You know, by October it was very clear who those people were in a big swath of the country. I mean, I think there are other people who fit that model that had nothing to do with Occupy. But so, no, that was something that profoundly changed how the conclusion was structured. I began doing the research in 2005, and at that point I think There was really not very much interest in general in the kind of milieu that STO was part of, much less in STO itself. And so it's been interesting to watch as the visibility of a group like STO has gotten greater and greater as I've gone further along in this research. And I don't think I had anything to do with that, really, because most people didn't know that I was working on this project. Thank you. But it's been gratifying to see that there is, I think, over time, a level of interest that has happened that way. That said, in terms of, like, how something like Occupy changed my vision of the bulk of the research for the book, I'm not sure that it changed much of anything. In some ways, I'd say it reconfirmed certain suspicions that I had developed about STO's analysis and that sort of thing.

Speaker 5: Right.

Michael Staudenmaier: I don't know that other than the conclusion where I was really deliberately trying to bring things up to the present day, I wouldn't say that too much else was sort of shattered by the rise of Occupy, if that makes sense.

Speaker 4: Yes. Yeah, you mentioned a few things that I want to more or less make a couple comments. In terms of like the— you mentioned about this Continuous rebellions that, you know, sometimes people think that, you know, with some sort of direction would not erupt.

Speaker 5: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: There is a problem with that also. These eruptions, such as what you mentioned, the Arab Spring, it only replaced, you know, dictatorship of a capitalist system with, you know, not still so much democratic within bourgeois politics. And actually, you know, we have to study history even more deeper because, I mean, this Occupy and the Arab Spring movements are not even close to what the Paris Commune was.

Michael Staudenmaier: Sure.

Speaker 4: You know, that was the first communist revolution in the world, you know, had workers' militias and so on, and were really a big challenge to, you know, the capitalist system. Such as May '68 in France. You know, that was really a revolutionary situation. And it comes always the question, you know, is it also how do you change things if there is not a program about, you know, what are we gonna do? I mean, how are we gonna deal with the state?

Michael Staudenmaier: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: You know, you got the issues of the productive areas like the factories and so on. How do you occupy this, you know, and transform it, you know, without or with having a leadership, you know, elected by the workers, etc., but still some sort of a leadership and, you know, a vision where it is that we have to go, you know. So I think it's, you know, the spontaneous element, if it is not combined With some sort of a perspective, an organization, we have seen the failures that history has shown us. That's one, you know, point that I want to, you know, throw into discussion.

Speaker 6: The only thing—

Speaker 4: another thing that I have noticed as an activist in the United States is one, and I can make the criticism from one good example you made at the beginning. Yeah. You know, the labor bureaucracy, you know, the labor bureaucracy as an agent of counterrevolution. All the organizations that I've seen in the United States, although more or less they say, you know, when you confront them with the role that the labor bureaucracy plays, they say yeah, they accept the argument, but in practice they don't weigh a significant, you know, an important fight against the labor bureaucracy. Because, as you know, it's needed that it is within this framework of capitalism. It's good that we organize ourselves in organizations, and, you know, the trade unions are one of the few organizations that the working— the workers have to, you know, more or less discuss things, to advance certain benefits, etc. But at the same time, they operate within the framework of capitalism. And Lenin observed, you know, not idealizing Lenin or, you know, making a god of him, but he makes some good observations in imperialism, that the trade union bureaucracy defends the foreign policy of imperialism. You know, Latin America is the main example of, you know, the FL-CIA playing a big role. Right. In the foreign policy of the United States, and, you know, so is the European freedom movement, etc. So it's the need, you know, while you defend the trade unions versus the capitalists, it's also the need to wage a fight as you are fighting the capitalists also against the trade union bureaucrats, because they see themselves not as fighters for social change and replacement of the capitalist system, They see themselves as managers of the working class, you know. So, uh, and another— sorry, if I can continue for a couple of things.

Speaker 6: No.

Speaker 4: There's one military slogan, you know, as you know, one military lesson that is studied probably in every military academy in the world, that is, uh, wherever you retreat, your enemy will advance. Well, whenever you are not acting, probably some sort of not trusty ally will cover that spot. And one of the things that, you know, you mentioned is about autonomy. You know, that could be a subject of interpretation, but certainly in the Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican communities, there's like a 2-tier problem.

Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4: Not only people of white some people call people of color, face oppression within the workplace, discrimination and some of these things. Also in the place that they reside, constantly confront the aspects of military repression by the, you know, paramilitary repression by the police, you know, lack of resources, you know, from housing issues, etc. And some sectors of the American left, for example, Have called populism when you more or less, you know, try to do some work in that regard, which is parallel. You can fight against capitalism while defend, you know, your safety, you know, your dignity to reside in a place or, you know, enjoy, you know, a safe living. So to this day, it's a problem, you know, that the so-called left You know, don't is that able to wave a link? You know, to to these communities, and that's why you know, for example, people complain oh the Black Panthers were authoritarian. You know, they were populist. They were Marx whatever we want to say. But certainly they did play a role that you know the so-called you know Leninists, the feudal Marxists didn't didn't. Weren't able to play, you know, the Mexican Brown Berets, the Puerto Rican YOLOs, the BSP, and the, you know, and the Black Panthers with all their problems, which these organizations are, you know, certainly were probably not the best example of leadership. Well, not probably, I would categorically say were not the best example of leadership neither. Not necessarily they had a, you know, a good program, but certainly they came and appeared there and had the biggest amount of people, of paramilitants, because of a vacuum, you know. Another, but, you know, the last comment I want to make, I don't want to continue going on with this, is that certainly The American left faces a problem in terms of solidarity. Sometimes people romanticize so much movements in the Third World where there are always— there are also contradictions, there are problems from race, like the indigenous people. You know, it's not easy to make a link in Latin America between the urban left and, you know, people from the indigenous groups, etc. And sometimes in this country, you know, radicals, leftists, and communists, they have focused so much in instances in solidarity in the abstract with the Third World that they haven't, you know, sometimes don't pay attention to the poor American worker, you know. And that's something that should be, you know, more or less addressed, you know, better.

Michael Staudenmaier: So I agree with you on that right there. And that's a lot, I guess. To try and give some brief sort of response, the first thing that you raised, I think, is not too far off from how Estes would have seen the question in terms of how do you strike the balance between the role of conscious revolutionaries and the role of mass rebels as they emerge. I think the difficult part is how do you answer that question, because that's a question that almost any intelligent evolutionary is going to come up against at some point. And, you know, I think you can see a range of answers. And hopefully my book attempts to document one sort of set of answers to that, as outlined by STO. The second one, on labor unions, I think STO always consistently took an a harder, more critical position on labor unions than the one that you're articulating, even though you're clearly talking about the bureaucrats and the government sort of being sort of co-managers with capitalism. But STO, and this is something I talk about extensively in the book, consistently rejected any opportunity that was presented to it when it was organizing in factories to organize within union structures. And that was a source of some conflict early on in the group, but it was something that was pretty consistently a mark of its work. The third one, in terms of sort of militarization and repression in communities of color, and therefore the correlating vibrancy of Sort of potentially more populist formations, things like the Panthers, that sort of stuff. I think that was stuff that SGO sort of in its initial conception saw itself responding to. There were actually veterans of both the Panthers and the Young Lords who were part of founding SGO at the very beginning, although neither of those 2 people stuck around very long.

Speaker 5: Thank you.

Michael Staudenmaier: You know, again, I think it resolves to that same question of what's the, what's the interplay between revolutionaries and mass movements. I think that the Panthers provided a particular sort of model for how to answer that question that I think ran into massive repression, but also carried an enormous number of internal contradictions. SCLC didn't see nearly as much repression, but had a different set of Internal contradictions. And finally, on the sort of solidarity versus kind of domestic class questions, that's something that I've thought a lot about as I've done this research. And I think one thing that's really interesting to me about STO is that it attempted to deal with both sides of that dynamic in different ways at different points. So, you know, I have a whole section of the book that talks about the workplace organizing that it did that was very much class-based, even though it also emphasized issues of white supremacy and white skin privilege in a class organizing context. And then at a later era, STO spent an enormous amount of effort involving itself in anti-imperialist solidarity efforts. So it saw both sides of that dynamic as well. Whether either aspect of that, in terms of sort of practical work that STO undertook, was productive in the long run is, I think, still an open question and one that I try to address.

Speaker 6: Yeah, so it's funny. I was a history major and I studied revolutions, but I've kind of left that world, got into a lot more spiritual way of shifting dynamic and change and energy on the planet. And so it's really interesting hearing a lot of this stuff again. It's like, it's so in here as opposed to like in the heart, the womb, the feet, the shifting, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker 7: Um.

Speaker 6: So I'm wondering if those folks did any of that kind of work as they were doing things, because I think sometimes revolution is, for a lot of people, is about yelling at you to change But not making any shift inside the person, him or herself, and within community and how we interact with each other and stuff like that. The second thing I want to mention that I've just been thinking about, I spent a lot of time living in Quebec and fuck, man, there's 80,000 people in the streets right now in fucking Montreal. We're sitting here in a room of like 20 people. We had maybe 5,000 10,000 people hanging out with us. You know, maybe 40,000, 50,000 other people in the burbs. There's only 7 million people in the whole freaking province of Quebec. And 185,000 students were out on strike. The workers, fire people, which is really interesting because they went out on strike, there were fires, and blah, blah, blah. I guess I don't see— Americans doing a revolution. I think there's a lot of complacency in our typical life, and because our life is so money-focused and spending money to have education, to have food, to have rent, to da da da da da da, that you have to spend a lot of time accumulating that. Whereas I see these potential for revolutionary type things going back to like, oh, I've left that kind of world behind, but. I see that potential happening in other places because the average life of the average person— like, they were striking because, you know, fees went up 75%. But if you only knew how much Quebecers paid for education, we would all be thrilled to pay that much, even 75% more. I mean, but it's a different world and it's a different thing. So, you know, as I'm spending the last few days, people are, you know, I hear a lot of people talking about revolution and I'm going, you know, man, I just— I don't see it. I see— I'd rather see us more centralized— localized and, you know, change the whole food production, change how we're living, changing how we're interacting with each other. And maybe if enough of us are doing that kind of thing, then we almost like sort of bypass the need for that whole centralized government structure, ridiculous Congress, Supreme Court that's doing bullshit stuff, and, you know, agribusiness and all those other things. Thank you. So those are just kind of some of the thoughts I'm having. And shit, if there's anybody in this room who's driving to Quebec in the next few days, I'm in your backseat. Busty.

Michael Staudenmaier: I'll start there. I was just in Montreal over the weekend. And yeah, it's very— it's just inspiring to see people everywhere with a little red cloth patch and a safety pin to their shirts. If you see the picture, like, there is a sea of red going up the So that said, and when I gave a version of this talk in Montreal, at the point where I talked about movements emerging from nowhere and their incredible dynamism, I said, you know, if I was writing this now, I'd of course be including the Quebec strike. Yeah, exactly. That said, I think I, on a personal level, I strongly disagree with the The notion that revolution is simply not on the table in this country. I don't perceive it as being likely. I like Noel's line in Black Worker, White Worker about whoever said revolution would be easy. I think one thing that I talk about— I spend part of one chapter describing STO's engagement with the anti-nuclear power movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yeah, we did. And one thing that they consistently tried to sort of deal with was to argue against what was then this kind of emerging sort of early version of some of the kind of more New Age dropout versions of what became the green movement, in terms of if we all build homemade solar panels and we evade the energy system that way, then then, you know, that avoids the necessity for revolutionary conflict. And they thought that that was false, and I would agree with them in that context and in a number of contemporary contexts. That said, your first point, I think, serves as effectively a valid criticism of one of STO's major failings, which was it was, I think, widely perceived by a lot of former members as not having been a particularly good home space for its members. I spend some time in the book describing some conflicts that emerged around questions of sort of internal dynamics around family life and around passions that brought people outside of the context of revolution. That's the bit where I talk about spectator sports and popular culture and these sorts of things that didn't necessarily sit easily In a group that said it was focused on these specific kind of left-brain tasks of making a revolution. No one that I know of in the group pursued a sort of explicitly spiritual path afterwards, although it's entirely possible that I simply didn't encounter those people.

Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.

Michael Staudenmaier: There are a lot. I interviewed close to 3 dozen former members, but that's, I don't know, maybe 10% of the group. A 10th or a 15th or a 20th of the total foreign members. So there could have been a lot of other trajectories that I simply wasn't aware of. But, but I would agree in the sense that the group in its era was not particularly good at sort of providing a landed experience for its membership. At the same time, in its defense, it said that wasn't its purpose. Its purpose was not to be a group of people who really liked each other and found community together was to be a group that brought together people who had a similar analysis and were willing to take common action. So, yes.

Speaker 5: Just, I didn't mean to start on this first, but just briefly about what you mentioned, Canada. Twice in 1968, I was held at the Canadian border for 2 and a half hours before they let me in the country. First time was at Montreal Airport. The second time was, uh, driving from Seattle to Vancouver. But anyway, um, for approximately 130,000 years, modern humanity has been in existence. And about 10,000 years ago, when governments came into existence because a tiny percentage of the population, uh, domesticated plants or animals and had to settle a community, and then the privileged group developed a government.

Speaker 6: Right.

Speaker 5: So governments came into existence to defend whatever group had As the privileges in the society or the means of wealth manufacturing. And all rebellions up until the Haitian Revolution was defeated. It was impossible for them to gain freedom. For thousands of years, people were massacred, peasants, etc. Now, with the advent of capitalism and 2 classes, it has become possible To make a revolution, class against class. And the capitalist state maintains the means to smash all opposition around the world. There's the working class, and there's the capitalist class. And if the working class takes power and is not organized to maintain that power with a government representing the working class, the former oppressors—

Speaker 6: Right.

Speaker 5: Will overthrow it and massacre them. So there has to be an organization representing the interests of the new class that has a government representing the workers, a workers' government. The democratic dictatorship of the working class is what it's called. And, and you say that you are anarchists. I'd like to know that there's many courageous anarchists in the past. Yes, and I'm sure there are some today too. So that if the capitalist system is overthrown, what— how do you maintain it without having an organization? How could a basketball team, a baseball team, or a fire department, if they're not organized with a program, be successful in winning a game or putting out a fire? I would not want to see an anarchist fire department right now if an emergency broke out in this building. If they didn't have an organization, we would be destroyed.

Michael Staudenmaier: Well, totally against anarchism.

Speaker 4: That's clear.

Michael Staudenmaier: I don't want to totally take the conversation away from STO and toward sort of my personal take on anarchism, but I would say, for what it's worth, that I think you misunderstand how The vast majority of all anarchists understand their politics when you describe anarchism as something that is entirely without organization. So we could even go at that perhaps at a later time. I think in terms of perhaps how it relates to STO, STO's vision of how to create a broadly free and egalitarian society was always marked by a Critical awareness of the pitfalls of prior revolutionary efforts. So that included a number of things that people inside the group wrote about the failures of the Russian Revolution and of the Cuban and Chinese revolutions as sort of key markers in that process. You know, I think we can go back and forth about when the Russian Revolution goes wrong. There are a million different answers to that question. But I would say that STO's answer was closer to an anarchist answer in terms of probably it was 1918 than it was to a sort of traditional Maoist answer that says it was 1953 or whenever it was, '56. So again, we could probably have a wonderful dialogue about that, but I do want to see if there are other questions about Either STO or sort of its specific legacy rather than speaking to my own personal take. I had 2 questions about how STO disbanded and was that like, did that reflect like what was involved in that and sort of about the like how people often see organizations disbanding as like a failure of the organization.

Speaker 6: How was that playing?

Michael Staudenmaier: And also, if you could speak a little bit more about gender in the organization and how they theorized on gender, if they did. Yeah, thanks especially for that one, because it's one that I think is really important in terms of understanding the CO. In terms of its ceasing to exist, it's very interesting. There is no recorded anything, and people's memories get It's kind of imprecise. So my book says 1986, but it could have been 1987. It could have been late 1985. It's kind of unclear. What basically happened is a series of political disagreements combined with a sort of demoralization in the context of the Reagan Revolution led to this attrition of all of the non-Chicago-based members. And after that point, which was about the end of 1983, The group pretty much functioned as what anarchists would call an affinity group for a number of years after that. And then at a certain point, it simply ceased to function. The networks still existed, but it was— they were networks where people were sort of maintaining friendships rather than networks where they were planning actions or developing a theory or anything like that. So the question of gender is a very complicated one. And I try to unpack it in a number of different ways in different parts of the book. STO always, start to finish, saw women as obviously being at a minimum half of the class, and also as experiencing specific oppressions. It focused a lot of effort at different points on trying to organize around issues that were of importance specifically to women. Whether that was in factories where women were paid substantially lower than men doing the same work, or whether that was in hospitals where you had overwhelmingly female staff, or whether that was in social movement contexts around reproductive rights or whatever, that was stuff that was hugely important to STL. What is interesting about STL's perspective on things, I'd say, is that it had what I think of as a somewhat stilted, not totally inaccurate, but not very well-rounded view of what feminism was that led it to identify itself as effectively not a feminist organization. And that developed over the course of the 1970s in opposition to this sort of rise of kind of bourgeois cultural feminism that was perceived as being— Overwhelmingly white in character. The criticism, as far as it went, was, I think, valid on a certain level, but it's notable, for instance, that even though a lot of very similar insights to Estio's analysis of white supremacy were emerging from the sort of developing women of color radicalism scene in that era, that there's no record of any interface interaction between those currents. So I think of that as a sort of clear missed opportunity where SDO could have learned enormous amounts and could have found potential allies in areas of work that were important to it. But because, for the most part, a lot of the women involved in that line of argumentation and activity didn't identify with a Leninist tradition, or at least not with the same one that SDO thought was important, It was just sort of ships crossing in the night. At the same time, I'd say it's too easy to simply sort of write off STO's, you know, sort of failure on that front as an overall failure to recognize the centrality of patriarchy and resistance to it. So it's a complicated picture, and, you know, hopefully The various parts of the book all coupled together kind of do justice to it.

Speaker 7: Other questions, comments?

Michael Staudenmaier: Okay, let me get you since you haven't spoken yet.

Speaker 7: How much interface, I guess, since that was interesting to me, do they have with the—

Michael Staudenmaier: I don't know how to describe it.

Speaker 7: Like the old Facing Reality group or some of those other groups that you might call the old ultra-left or something, that they almost became the similar positions as, but as you describe in the book, they're much more— the genesis of them seems much more out of the new communist movement.

Michael Staudenmaier: Yeah. You know, it's interesting because there's a version of people's understanding of the legacy of SCO that draws this sort of straight line from From CLR James to STO. And there, James was familiar with STO and did interact with them a lot. The real line of connection was largely through 2 individuals. One was Noel Ignatieff, and the other was Ken Lawrence, who I mentioned briefly in my readings. Lawrence had been a member of Facing Reality and didn't join He was a member of SDO until sort of later in the game, but knew pretty much all of the founding members in that wing of the left, as SDO was at the end of the '60s. And kind of, he's the person who introduced Noel to James, and so that you can sort of say that Lawrence is the kernel of some of that, even though at a later point when Lawrence is actively involved in the organization, he would often take the sort of most doctrinaire, old-school line on things.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Michael Staudenmaier: Mm-hmm. —in a way that was very different from the kind of unorthodox thing that James had going on. So there is— there's a connection, but it's not as strong of a connection historically as is sometimes perceived, I think, by people who have a vision of STO that is based on a number of documents that highlight the Jamesian element, if you will, and that in Black Worker, White Worker, which I just read about is one of those. Clearly, it's— you read that and you can't help but see the influence of C.L.R. James. And I excised from this reading a bunch of stuff in my narrative where I talk about the influence of James, um, on that developing wing. But there were other people who had sort of a vision of, uh, you know, of a radical reinterpretation of Leninism that didn't draw on The Jamesian tradition at all, but they're much more sort of Gramscian, that sort of thing. And in terms of like other ultra-left visions of Marxism, very little influence inside STO. STO was kind of scornful of a lot of that, as you know, and this was sort of projecting in some ways, but those are the people who only did theory, you know. And that was certainly a criticism that a lot of people made of STO after a certain point. So, you know, I think it was sort of maybe a little— hit a little close to home in some ways. But there really wasn't much of engagement with that tradition, I'd say. Okay. So, Brian first. All right. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay. You know, that's a good point. You haven't said anything. So let's take you first.

Speaker 7: Okay. I'm going to take it back to you a little bit.

Speaker 5: Okay.

Speaker 7: 2 things. Like, one, you said you're part of a revolutionary organization, and so, you know, what is it like through your research about this organization? Like, what lessons do you draw? Do you— like, I know you said there was lots of things that you wouldn't probably want to have in your organization, but like, what's the lessons you draw so far? What is the role of a specific political organization or revolutionary organization? Um, and then why did you choose this specific organization to Um, point.

Michael Staudenmaier: On the first one, I'd say there are a lot, but I could pick one that we haven't really touched on, and that is that a specific revolutionary organization provides an opportunity to reflect critically on engagement in mass activity and to develop sort of novel theoretical theorizations of that activity. And that is something that I definitely would say I think my vision of how that could proceed changed through the process of researching how SCO attempted to do that. The second question about why I chose this project project is really kind of happenstance in some ways. I talk about a little bit in the very beginning of the introduction of the book that in the mid-'90s, a bunch of us who were sort of younger anarchists in Chicago, through a couple of different accidents of history, ended up meeting a number of former members of SCL who were still kicking around Chicago and who were still interested in engaging with the radical left. And to their credit, I think, they didn't simply say, you guys use a different label than what we used, so we're not going to touch you. They instead sort of said what— you know, it was the same— they did kind of the same thing to us they did to the workers at Western Electric, really, because it began with we were looking for a print shop that would print some posters for us, and the vestigial print shop that had once been SDO's in-house press was still operating, and the folks who ran it at the time basically gave us free labor for the poster printings. And that began this kind of dialogue. Through that, we ended up having lots of interesting political conversations. The print shop had a back closet that had a bunch of old SCLC documents that I got copies of. And so it was really this sort of thing where it had been an influence on my political development. And so I was And at a certain point, I decided that if I was going to do a research project of some sort, which was something that I'd been thinking about for years, I was pretty well positioned to do a research project about STO in particular. So I guess that, you know, was sort of this combination of political interest combined with feeling like I had a good head start on how I would take on the project. Okay. So, Brett.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 7: Sort of 2 questions again. One is, did they— to what extent did they have links with organizations or other groups, you know, whether it was community-based groups or other left groups or whatever? And the second question is, Were there particular, like, individuals that they looked to, like C.L.R. James, for example, or others who were kind of, like, really central to their theory and practice and stuff like that? And then kind of a related question is, like, how much—

Michael Staudenmaier: how— Yeah.

Speaker 7: How much did they focus on, like, U.S. history and U.S.-based movements, as opposed to the sort of traditional, like, Russian Revolution or Chinese Revolution or whatever that a lot of left groups were fixated with?

Michael Staudenmaier: So on the first one, they were constantly trying to engage a wide variety of groups at various levels. A big thing for them for a long time was the concept of building a tendency, and that— what that meant changed over time. But the idea was always, there's no way we can do this by ourselves, and it has to be— you know, we have to draw in people with whom we have substantial political disagreements, but we can work together, basically. The second question, there, if you look at the SCO web archive, which is at SojournerTruth.org, I believe. No, SojournerTruth.net. There's a nice composite image of what was effectively STO's pantheon, and it's Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C.L.R. James, which is an interesting sort of difference from what some people have described to me as the history of shading version that's That's Marx with the big beard, and then you get Lenin with the goatee, and you have Stalin with the mustache, and Mao clean-shaven. So anyway, if you look at that website, it's kind of in that same kind of like red tones that you expect to see in kind of capital-C communist iconography. So that really was their sort of list of these are their intellectual mentors, and the inclusion of both Du Bois and James I think gives you a sense of the importance that history generally played for them, and U.S. history in particular. For them, the most important Du Bois document was Black Reconstruction, his mammoth history of the Civil War and its aftermath from the perspective of the Black community. Right. Black Worker. And yeah, absolutely, they saw so much that was unique in the trajectory of U.S. history that didn't match the experiences of various European revolutions. The key thing there being the legacy of white supremacy and how that played out from the development of chattel slavery onward. So it's not surprising, I think, that there are I believe at least three former members of the group who are now professional, or at least at certain point became professional historians. So it's there is strong sense of the importance of history and U.S. history in particular in that process. Okay, yes, you. What was there?

Speaker 4: You mentioned that they did some united front with the Puerto Rican independence movement. How was that relation, and with which organizations?

Michael Staudenmaier: Sure. I don't think they would ever— I do not think they would have characterized it as a united front. They did use that term in different spots, but I don't think they ever used it to describe the work that they did in solidarity with the independence movement. They aligned themselves with a fairly small organization that developed In the mid to late 1970s. It was called the Movement for National Liberation, or MLN, which was originally a binational group of some Mexican revolutionaries and some Puerto Rican revolutionaries. It was very active in Chicago, and because Chicago was sort of home base for STO, that was a big, important thing. The MLN had effectively fraternal relations with a small organization on the island that was called the Puerto Rican Socialist League that was headed by a guy named Juan Antonio Correjer. So there was this sort of network of a small branch of the independence movement that STO identified itself with. And it's important to note that in that context, STO was one of several predominantly or exclusively white organizations that latched themselves onto the MLN-LSP milieu, if you will, in reaction against the ways in which the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, which is this sort of broad-based anti-imperialist, pro-Puerto Rican independence construct, had played out over the course of the mid-'70s And its relationship to the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, which was the sort of hegemonic Puerto Rican left organization of its era, the early to mid-1970s. So that's sort of a long and kind of nerdy answer to your question.

Speaker 7: That's okay.

Michael Staudenmaier: They saw their role as effectively popularizing support for Puerto Rican independence among non-Puerto Rican sectors of the populations where they So that was largely white folks, but not necessarily exclusively. And I hope that answers the question as well.

Speaker 4: Yeah, actually, the BSP was a follower of the NPI, pro-independence movement. And before the mid-'70s, there were, you know, other broad solidarity movements. Which were frequent with the MPI. And certainly the MLN was one of the, if not the smallest of the organizations.

Michael Staudenmaier: Yes, absolutely. The MLN was always a very small organization. It was often quite dogmatic. It had what STO perceived as an important redeeming character in that it actively, vocally, and unhesitatingly supported armed struggle on behalf of Puerto Rican independence. And that was a very controversial position within a group like the PSP. And for STO, it was an important kind of dividing line. So that's what led STO, I think, in a lot of ways to align itself specifically with the MLN. An entire chapter of my book, an overwhelming majority of one chapter of the book, is devoted to trying to sort of track that relationship. And so, you know, I could go on. One of the things that drew me to SDO originally was that I, as a young anarchist arriving in Chicago in the mid-1990s, spent a number of years working in and around the Puerto Rican community with the last vestiges of what had been the MLN. So when I discovered that this group that I was already interested in had a similarly kind of critical engagement, sometimes frustrating, problematic encounter with the MLN, you know, a couple decades previous, that was sort of an extra thing that kind of piqued my interest. So, yes.

Speaker 3: This follows up somewhat on your reply to Bryan. I wonder if you could just clearly articulate for us what was STO's understanding of of the role that white supremacy had played within U.S.

Michael Staudenmaier: history?

Speaker 3: I mean, I imagine there's debate about it, obviously, but I mean, if there are key points of debate within that, you know, probably overall agreement that it's really important, that it's fucked up class consciousness, etc., whatever. And then what did that mean for practice in terms of that understanding? And maybe a footnote to that would be, I mean, did the work of Ted Allen figure into their understanding at all, and the invention of the white race, something I've been kind of into lately through Jeff Perry? I don't know if you know who that is.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Michael Staudenmaier: On that last point, yes, absolutely. Ted Allen was never a member of STO, but he was close comrades during pretty much the entire time STO was around and before with Noel and Newton. So Allen's ideas were hugely important inside STO. STO repeatedly published a bunch of talks and pamphlets and stuff That Allen produced in the early '70s. So in terms of the sort of central role of white supremacy, they very much adhered to kind of Ted Allen's line on that, which, for people who aren't familiar with the work of Ted Allen, he basically advanced this argument that said white supremacy was the active, intelligent, deliberate creation of— Right. Effectively the planter class in coastal Virginia in the late 17th century, and that the idea was to avoid sort of cross-racial, class-based uprisings, of which there were many in that region of Virginia in the 17th century. By creating a set of racially based distinctions and attendant privileges for people who are identified as white. So effectively, the common status as bondservants gets turned into a limited status of indentured servitude for a certain number of years for white people and heritable chattel status for all black people and all of their descendants. So that was basically this, in STO's eyes, was this sort of pivotal moment in the development of how white supremacy was used as a wedge to divide the class. So the vision was to create a broad-based class struggle. You cannot do that in the United States context without first dismantling the division between Black workers and white workers. And that is a huge running theme throughout STO's existence, but especially during the early years when it's actively working in multiracial factory settings. And the practical terms that you wanted to hear about in, in factory settings, that basically almost always amounted to what are the demands of, um, the extant Black Radical Caucus on the shop floor And how do we rally white workers to demands, even and especially when those demands do not speak to the immediate needs of the white workers themselves, which was this sort of quixotic approach to— and that was a lot of what led some people to label it as moralistic, was you're forcing white people to take action that doesn't benefit them in any immediate sense. And STO always had a hard time understanding why that was perceived as a bad or a difficult thing, sort of advancing the argument that there's always a moral imperative in any revolutionary struggle that does not simply resolve to immediate practical gains. And I mean, I'd say that's a position that I would share in those terms as well. But that's sort of an example of how it played out in terms of the factory work, and that changed over time as SDO involved itself in different areas of work. Yes?

Speaker 5: Any organization that strives to bring about real change in this world must put as a prime component of its program and activities the discrimination against women first, because that is the oldest form of discrimination and the most widespread form. The majority of African American males in this country We have varying types of conscious and unconscious discrimination against women. And it is extremely horrible here in the United States. Just over the past year, I've been doing some different types of investigation, and it's worse than I remember. Every day I find out something new. It's horrible here in the United States, the discrimination against women. And so you have to be against color discrimination, religious discrimination, but women should be at the forefront, because that was the foundation of oppression in this world.

Michael Staudenmaier: Thank you. Yeah, it's very interesting that you phrase it in those terms, because especially following on the question about Ted Allen, I found a fascinating letter that Ted Allen wrote to Noel Ignatin, but that was then sort of disseminated amongst the membership of STO in 1978, I think, that goes over a whole range of subjects. He's very critical of STO's turn toward anti-imperialism. Yeah. Solidarity, for instance. But one of the things that he goes on about at great length is more or less exactly what you're saying, that he feels that SDO has turned its back on the central role of oppression of women and resistance to patriarchy, and has articulated this position that effectively says the, you know, the condition of women can be so substantially improved under capitalism as to basically eviscerate male supremacy. And he's harshly critical of that position. And so I spend some time in the book trying to sort of track that argument, both Allen's contribution to it and some subsequent responses inside STO as well.

Speaker 5: Yes?

Michael Staudenmaier: Where are they now? Any tendencies that they gravitated toward? I've been saying that I could divide the people that I had encounters with, which Which again is only a small fraction of the total former membership. But the people that I had encounters with, I think, can be divided into effectively 2 camps. One is a camp of people who have more or less thrown in the towel and either retreated from political engagement entirely or have sort of made their long-term peace with the impossibility of revolution, say, and engage at this point on a sort of You know, we don't like Obama, but we hold our nose kind of level. And the other camp is people who are still critically involved in varying forms of radical political activity. And so some of that I talked a little bit about in terms of people who got their feet wet with Occupy in different places. A lot of that comes in the form of— Occupy Wall Street. Kind of small-scale, limited-scope mentoring relationships with younger radicals that involve a lot of sort of backstage conversations, if you will. Certainly there is a legacy, for instance, in terms of my own experience in the 1990s doing sort of anti-fascist organizing, there was a legacy of people who had been actively involved in STO Who were subsequently actively involved in other anti-fascist work. That was an area of work that was very important to SDO for a period of time. I talk about it a little bit in the book. So it hasn't been a total loss, I would say. It's, you know, one thing that somebody pointed out to me is, I think Max Elbaum in his book Revolution in the Air talks about the striking number of people. It's a small, small in number, but notable fact that—

Speaker 5: 2,000.

Michael Staudenmaier: Certain people who had been very prominent in the New Communist Movement ended up engaging completely on the other side of things, either as sort of large-scale investor, you know, sort of executive types, or as, you know, politicians or whatever. There's effectively none of that in the former membership of STO.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Michael Staudenmaier: So for whatever that's worth. There's nobody who, you know, gives a black eye to the— well, I mean, I don't know, depends on your perspective, I guess. There's probably people who were in the group who think everybody else gives a black eye to, you know, their, their, you know, they were the only ones who held firm. But my perspective, you know, there's people who are kind of meh, but nobody who, you know, is totally wretched about it.

Speaker 6: Okay.

Michael Staudenmaier: I realize it's a low bar to set, but I feel like that is the legacy of that era, is that there's a lot of people who, you know, who didn't meet that low bar.

Speaker 4: What about it swollen and got eye instead of a black eye?

Michael Staudenmaier: Fair enough. Yeah, perhaps an allergic reaction, inflammation. It just made, you know— It's like eating peanuts or something.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, I mean, how cool his eye would look if it is open, right? How cool his eye would look if it is open.

Michael Staudenmaier: That's a good point. Yeah, uh, I just want to make you aware. I know, I know, I, I, I get the— it is one of those metaphors that has certain, certain overtones.