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Once the steel connection had been established, STO looked to expand its horizons further by publishing a special edition of the Insurgent Worker that focused entirely on the steel industry. This one-off project was a collaboration between STO and like-minded comrades in the steel mills of Detroit and Buffalo.139 In a parallel vein, the group published a series of pamphlets over the course of 1972 that were intended for national distribution. Some of them, like the criticism of the Revolutionary Union’s attempts (along with the now party-oriented Black Workers’ Congress) to build a “United Front Against Imperialism,” were aimed at a narrow left audience.140 Others, however, were pitched as how-to manuals on a variety of topics, and were somewhat more broadly applicable. One of these was a pamphlet entitled Organizing Working Class Women, which argued that women occupied key roles in the struggle against capitalism, even while it recognized that most women did not work in heavy industry.141 This pamphlet was part of a continuing emphasis STO placed on women’s issues, although it clearly positioned itself within the framework established by the feminist radicals. One of the pamphlet’s major contentions is that “working women’s power lies with their class, with the growth of working-class consciousness, and the development of concrete challenges to bourgeois society and bourgeois ideas. Through the development of dual power organizations of workers, proletarian women can identify where their power lies as a class, even though they may not be directly involved in production.”142
Although the immediate effects of such efforts to project STO politics on a national scale were limited, the idea of intervening in a small way in mass struggles outside the Chicago area remained central to the group’s strategy for the rest of its existence, even after workplace organizing had ceased to be a priority. A much more complicated attempt to implement STO’s approach to point-of-production work arose in the form of the Farah Strike in El Paso, Texas. Four thousand garment workers at the Farah Manufacturing Company were on strike for almost two years, from May of 1972 until March of 1974, initially because several workers had been fired for attending a pro-union rally.143 What began as a local labor dispute quickly became a nationwide fixation for labor and left movements, partly because Farah-brand blue jeans were sold across the country, but also because the workforce was overwhelmingly Mexican-American, and overwhelmingly female.
Like most other New Communist Movement organizations, not to mention the mainstream labor movement, STO took an immediate interest in the strike. The group organized fundraising events as a way to educate and involve factory workers in Chicago, and many of the shop sheets reported sympathetically on the women’s struggles. In addition, however, STO took the extra step of sending people to El Paso, first on an investigative trip and later on a long-term assignment to work directly with the strikers.144 At the time, STO included a number of native Spanish speakers, and at least two of them spent much of 1973 living in El Paso, providing direct assistance to the strikers.145 While other left groups may have sent similar delegations, STO’s unique politics around trade unions ensured that its approach was distinctive. From early on, the garment workers had been officially members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), but as usual STO encouraged the women not to place their trust in the union. For a brief period the prospects for collaboration seemed good, but internal problems in Chicago contributed to a sluggish response. A small number of members, including those who traveled to El Paso, were inspired by the possibilities of the struggle, but the majority of the membership was unfamiliar with the issues and apparently unwilling to be distracted from their own immediate organizing responsibilities in order to focus on a campaign taking place a thousand miles away.146 As a result, the Farah strike remained on the back burner for the organization as a whole, and in the end the women put their faith in the ACWA rather than in STO.
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Another problem area for the Sojourner Truth Organization during its workplace period was the cultural realm. Certainly, the group understood on a basic level the importance of popular culture as a motivating force in people’s lives, but STO was for the most part unable to harness its power. Several former members recall a certain woodenness to the group’s cultural work. Events planned for after-work hours tended to be educationals or fundraisers (on Farah, for example, or other important struggles from across the country), rather than simply arenas for the building of affinity and solidarity among workers. Former member Guillermo Brzotowski remembers a handful of dance parties that brought together workers from several of the factories where STO had a presence, but this was clearly the exception rather than the rule.147 The fact that most early STO members did not themselves have children may have contributed to a blind spot in the organization around the concept of the working-class family.148 Partly as a result, the group’s members shared with many other New Communist groups a single-mindedness as organizers and political militants that partially alienated them from their target audience of coworkers, who were often impressed with their dedication but in most circumstances were unwilling to replicate it.
The root of much of this disconnection was probably the class division between STO members, who were generally university-educated and in many cases from bourgeois backgrounds, and their coworkers at factories like Stewart-Warner. One former member describes himself and his then-comrades as having no sense of “the richness of working-class life.”149 In reaction, many members of the group attempted to adopt certain cultural forms that they identified as appropriate to the working class, such as musical interests. Long-time member John Strucker maintains that “most of the time I was in STO, we were way into whatever music the working-class people we were with, liked. And, basically, Chicago being Chicago, that meant soul and blues on the one hand, and country and western on the other.”150 Similarly, Kingsley Clarke remembers “a certain shit-kicking Johnny Cash-like culture,” that he encountered early on: “my first exposure to STO was in Gary, and on the second day they invited me to eat breakfast, and they were drinking whiskey for breakfast. And I think that was a bit of a posture.”151
For some members, the posture transformed into a more developed political stance. One tendency within STO was labeled “workerist” because of the emphasis placed on integrating as fully as possible with the working class. In many cases, this manifested itself in the adoption of common working-class attitudes, including eventually a willingness to work with the trade unions. Noel Ignatiev recalls “the people who really dug in, got a house and wife and kids in Gary … some are probably retired by now, if they didn’t destroy their lungs.”152 From the perspective of those who remained in STO for the long-haul, these people were inevitably lost to the struggle, as they made their peace with the unions, and with the day-to-day realities of working-class life. On the other hand, the workerist attitude was an important corrective to the woodenness or posturing that characterized much of STO’s early work. In the end, a split in the organization over these issues would mark the conclusion of STO’s initial workplace period.
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Internal disagreements