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Truth and Revolution. Michael Staudenmaier
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isbn 9781849350983
Автор произведения Michael Staudenmaier
Издательство Ingram
59 Young Lords Organization 1, no. 5 (January, 1970), 3.
60 See Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2011), 66–100, for more on this process, normally labeled the original Rainbow Coalition.
61 Lynn French, email to the author, November 27, 2006.
62 Lynn French, email to the author, November 28, 2006. For more on Sojourner Truth, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
63 See the capsule biography of Travis used to honor her at an awards ceremony in 1994. Available online at http://www.chicagodsa.org/d1994/index.html (accessed January 9, 2012)
64 Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (New York: The New Press, 2003), 102–108.
65 Carole Travis, interview with the author, June 6, 2006.
66 Don Hamerquist, interview with the author, September 14, 2006.
67 “Oregon: Marxist From Multnomah,” Time, October 13, 1967.
68 Gramsci’s The Modern Prince had been available in English as early as 1957, but his pivotal essay “Soviets in Italy” appeared in New Left Review no. 51 (September/October, 1968), 28–58. STO would subsequently reprint this selection as a pamphlet.
69 Don Hamerquist, interview with the author, September 14, 2006.
70 Ken Lawrence, interview with the author, August 24, 2006.
71 J. Sakai, interview with the author, November 9, 2006. For more on Wobbly resurgence, see Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, eds., Dancin’ in the Streets!: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists and Provos in the 1960s, as Recorded in the Pages of The Rebel Worker and Heatwave (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2005).
72 Don Hamerquist and Noel Ignatin, “A Call to Organize,” in Workplace Papers (Chicago: STO, 1980), 2.
73 For background on the New Communist Movement, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air.
74 Much of what follows comes from two “Outline History of STO” documents, one from 1972, the other from 1981, both written largely by Noel Ignatin. The 1972 version is available online at http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/sto.htm (accessed January 9, 2012). The latter document in author’s possession.
75 “Outline History of STO” (1972).
76 These positions are clearly outlined in Toward a Revolutionary Party (Chicago: STO, 1976 [1971]), one of STO’s earliest political statements.
77 Kingsley Clarke recalls Bob Avakian, then of the Revolutionary Union, denouncing the white skin privilege line as “bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt” at a conference in 1974. Clarke, interview with the author, July 6, 2005.
78 “Outline History of STO” (1972).
79 “Outline History of STO” (1972). “Communist” was still in use as late as the publication of Bread and Roses in late 1970 or early 1971, but was missing from the first issue of the Insurgent Worker in May 1971.
Chapter Two: The Petrograd-Detroit Proletariat
In the fall of 1973, a six-day long wildcat strike took place at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois.80 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 (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 they would need to pick up the slack, union officials counseled the men to accept the changes while their concerns were investigated. No doubt thinking of the many accidents caused by previous management speed-ups, 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 work load 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 mass. IBEW officials told the workers their strike was illegal and that no aid would come from the union if they didn’t end the walkout 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 miniscule 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 recruit new members. But there was a problem: the strikers weren’t interested. As one worker explained, “We don’t want any communists, socialists, movies, raps, leaflets, newspapers, newspaper interviews, photographs, lectures or anything else.”81 Most Marxist organizations viewed this sort of rejection as a kind of working-class anticommunism and abandoned the struggle in frustration.
One of the only left groups that established ongoing communication with the strikers was