Chapter Six: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics in a Revolutionary Organization
On February 5, 1981, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, as part of the group’s long tour in support of their magnificent 1980 double album, The River.452 Outside the venue, several members of STO, along with friends and comrades organized as the Committee Against War and Imperialism (CAWI), distributed thousands of copies of a leaflet to fans headed into the arena. The CAWI leaflet featured a classic photo of the young Springsteen, sporting a black suit and a partially buttoned white shirt with the collar out, leaning against a brick wall. Designed as an 8½ by 11 inch fold-over in booklet style with a headline in the ransom-note cut-out letters so popular in the punk-rock milieu of the time, it quoted extensively from Springsteen songs like “Badlands,” “Born to Run,” “Racing in the Street,” and of course “The River” itself: in the midst of a recession, the lyrics “I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company/But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy” spoke directly to the problems of working class life, and STO knew it.453
The CAWI leaflet took the dynamic tension in Springsteen’s songs and linked it to a broader social reality. Speaking directly of contemporary problems like unemployment, police brutality, cuts in welfare, limits on abortion, Klan and neo-Nazi violence, and the threat of nuclear war, the leaflet argued that reality “contradicts the ‘american dream,’” leaving people “confused, disheartened, crushed, broken and ANGRY as they chase after the illusion of having a good life.”454 Ronald Reagan, newly inaugurated as the fortieth President of the United States, represented a racist and imperialist politics that promised to make things even worse. Unfortunately, the leaflet continued, “people generally see their rotten life as a personal problem and try to solve it individually or put the blame on the wrong people. The rich and powerful in the u.s. are our real enemies, the ones making our lives miserable. This makes us angry, and we need to be more angry. We are the ones who can change all this.” But this was not just a standard leftist denunciation of the laundry list of capitalist evils with an exhortation to mass resistance; it was truly aimed at fans of Springsteen and his music. “For the most part,” the leaflet argued, “Springsteen is telling it like it is.” Reflecting a fundamental conviction within STO that popular culture was a reflection of social struggle, it maintained that “Bruce will write and sing the songs that reflect our collective anger and our movement to make human dignity a reality for our lives. We have to FIGHT, together, for this.” The leaflet ended with a brief description of CAWI, which opposed nuclear power and weapons, racist violence by fascists and the police, and “u.s. intervention in El Salvador, the Middle East, or anywhere else the u.s. wants to impose its rule.” “We want,” it concluded, “to help people organize themselves to REBEL against all this shit coming down. No more imperialist war! No more racist attacks!”
While the CAWI leaflet clearly put an unorthodox and radical spin on Springsteen’s music, it was not primarily opportunistic. Like much of STO’s membership, a number of people in the Kansas City branch loved music—rock and roll, R&B, and punk rock in particular. For them, the chance to publicly combine the love of Springsteen’s music with their passion for politics was exciting. Former Kansas City STO member Randy Gould remembers it as “one of my favorite all time leaflets.”455 Of course, this enthusiasm also reflected how rare such interventions were for the group. As an organization, STO was only intermittently attentive to cultural questions in its political work, but internally the group was hardly ascetic. Discussions on music, art, movies and television, and other cultural forms were frequent, and frequently intense. Similarly, the political aspects of the personal lives of individual STO members sometimes became the subject of organizational discussion, with both positive and negative consequences. And certainly one of the defining characteristics of the group by the late seventies was its dedication to internal political education, study, and debate. These aspects of STO’s existence could be glimpsed on occasion in the group’s external political work and publications, as in the example of the CAWI leaflet or the organization’s well-known dialectics courses. But beyond the group’s public face, an assessment of the organization’s internal life is highly instructive and indeed necessary for a full picture of STO’s history and legacy.
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Springsteen was hardly the only musical artist to draw STO’s attention. In the mid- to late seventies, the group also turned a critical and political eye to the then newly emerging genre of punk rock. Punk music had an extensive but largely submerged (pre-) history in the United States by the time it was blasted into popular consciousness with the sudden emergence of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and other British groups in 1976.456 Punk’s embrace by young people, combined with its aesthetic of rejection and extremism, guaranteed that it became fertile ground for a range of radical political perspectives, from both the right (quasi-fascist) and the left (especially Marxist and anarchist). Still, the organized left in particular had an ambivalent relationship with punk. While by no means devoid of people of color, the punk milieu in the US was heavily white, which turned off a significant segment of the US left, even—or especially—those segments that were themselves also lacking in diversity. Similarly, punk’s aggressive attitude and sometimes antisocial lyrics did not mix well with the organized left’s frequently puritanical approach to the cultural realm. This often led to a dismissal of punk rock as “a social disease” that deserved to be tossed “in the garbage heap.”457 By contrast, other left organizations, including several Trotskyist groups in the US and Great Britain, attached themselves to punk as a possible venue for recruitment among disaffected young people. Thus, for example, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain promoted “Rock Against Racism” as a way of encouraging participation in its antifascist organizing efforts.458
For STO, however, punk rock was more complex than either of these two extreme viewpoints could accommodate, and, in a group that prized sophisticated critical analysis, this complexity demanded research and debate. Thus, at the beginning of 1978, the group sent two members, Lee Holstein and Elaine Zeskind, on a three week tour of California and the southwest “to investigate the punk scene.”459 This trip immediately resulted in an article by Zeskind, which after more than a year of “informal debates about punk among Sojourner Truth Organization members” was finally published in Urgent Tasks in 1979, along with an interview she conducted with Tony Kinman, himself a political radical as well as the bass player and lead singer for the San Francisco punk band the Dils. Zeskind’s article, entitled “Punk Rock: Music in Search of a Movement,” is as much an examination of Marxist theories of art and aesthetics under capitalism as it is an analysis of punk rock in particular. The article was clearly aimed at people on the left with little to no experience of punk music or culture, as evidenced by the detailed (and humorous) explanation of pogo dancing: “an asexual ‘dance’ consisting of shoving or pulling the person next to you while simultaneously jumping up and down on every beat, and, preferably, having something handy to throw towards the stage.”460
Zeskind’s article repudiates the left tendency to judge punk, preferring instead to contextualize and understand it. She begins with a series of questions about the politics of punk—“Is punk decadent and fascist, or revolutionary? Is it a Madison Avenue hype-job, or a revolt against the record and radio industries? Is it art or is it noise?” Committed to complexity, she rejects the binaries and instead maintains, “It is all those things.”461 The defining characteristics of early punk, according to Zeskind, were its lack of commercial appeal as music and its refusal to lyrically glorify love and dancing. The fact that punk lyrics sometimes tended toward political topics, as with the Clash for example, made it possible to consider the punk milieu something like a movement in embryo. Zeskind’s article adopts a view of the complicated relationship between movement and culture derived largely from the work of C.L.R. James, who was a significant and growing influence within STO at the time. James repeatedly suggested that the specific forms of cultural production that most thoroughly capture the popular imagination, whether in literature, film, music, or sports, are reflective of the level of consciousness and struggle in the society in question. In the cultural context of 1950, James argued “it is in the serious study of, above all, Charles Chaplin, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart … that you find the clearest ideological expression of the sentiments and deepest feelings of the American people and a great window into the future of America and the modern world.”462 STO took this analysis to heart, applying it both to punk rock and (in the CAWI leaflet) to Springsteen.463 Thus, in Zeskind’s formulation of the theme, “the level of class struggle has been in a period of lull. Therefore the prospects for progressive developments in the realm of culture catching hold and polarizing masses of people becomes necessarily limited.”464 This was especially true compared to the sixties, when the relative strength of mass movements meant that “culture was often an effective weapon in revolutionaries’ arsenals.”465 As the CAWI leaflet would argue three years later about Springsteen, Zeskind suggests that the potential inherent in punk rock could only fully emerge from within an upsurge of social struggle.
Still, there were some immediate possibilities. In Zeskind’s view, the vibrant intensity of early punk culture was reflective of age-old spontaneous tendencies toward popular resistance. In discussing fans’ anger at security guards and bouncers at a Ramones concert, she notes parenthetically that “sometimes people stand up before they know precisely why or for what. If they didn’t, revolutionaries would have gone out of business long ago.”466 Zeskind also criticizes a common left approach to culture that was indebted (whether consciously or not) to Soviet-style socialist realism. She mocks “the idea that we [the organized left] are going to produce the working-class culture singlehandedly, and preferably in the folk or blues modes.”467 Indeed, the US left in the seventies, often under the leadership of a generation of radicals who had come of age in the civil rights era of the late fifties and early sixties, featured a combination of rising cultural puritanism and fetishized romanticization of what was perceived to be true or authentic working-class culture.468 In terms of music, this often meant a rehashing of Pete Seeger stylings or an opportunistic devotion to whatever was popular in a given organizing context. This last attitude had characterized some of STO’s initial interventions in workplace settings, as discussed earlier in Chapter Two, but by the mid-seventies the group had begun to appreciate the autonomous complexity of the cultural realm, even as much of the rest of the left took increasingly rigid positions on cultural questions. As Tony Kinman put it in his interview, “they [the organized left] don’t want to hear about it [punk]. All they want is their folk song records, or like the Berkeley Women’s [Music] Collective singing songs of feminist struggle in this country. They just seem really closed-minded to what we’re doing.”469
In this context, it was easy for many STO members to relate to Kinman’s confusion in the face of the organized left’s willingness to believe mainstream stereotypes of punk as “irresponsible, violent, [and] sexist.” In his words, “the left in this country has been victims of that same sort of thinking. And they turn around and do it to us. And I can’t see why, why they want to.”470 Zeskind’s piece suggests that this dismissive attitude on the part of the left was a small part of what she believed was the coming suppression of punk music. While punk was in fact eventually recuperated by the musical mainstream, her view was at the time supported by considerable evidence, including police raids on many punk clubs and the refusal of major record labels to sign additional punk bands after Warner Brothers’ debacle with the Sex Pistols (who broke up shortly after signing with the label). Regardless, Zeskind points out, “it is a bit ludicrous to debate … whether [punk bands] should be allowed (!) to play at left events which do not attract the masses anyway.”471 The article ends with a call to “criticize the immediate and blanket condemnation of punk by most of the left,” which Zeskind identifies as “another example of the knee-jerk, self-righteous responses [the left] brings not only to cultural questions but political questions generally.”472 Without demanding that all her comrades start listening to punk rock, Zeskind’s article encouraged them to take it seriously as a cultural—and thus political—phenomenon.
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One reason STO took such questions seriously had little to do with politics as it was traditionally construed: the members of the group had real and full human lives beyond their political work. It is too easy to think of the revolutionary cadre of the seventies as what one STO sympathizer called “the 100% political person” who ate, breathed, and slept revolution.473 In reality, every leftist of this or any other era necessarily participated in the culture of the times, from when they were children all the way through adulthood. Like the rest of the world, people in STO listened to music, on record or in concert, not primarily to assess its organizing potential but because they enjoyed it. As former member Lee Churgin remembers it, culture and “especially music was really important for a lot of people [in STO].… We did a lot of dancing too. Dancing and going to listen to music.”474 The group was diverse enough that there was no narrow subcultural unity, however. Instead, according to former member and sometime musician Bill Lamme, culture broadly and music in particular “was the uniting element between certain subgroups. You know, there would be the rocking group, the dance partying-oriented, or whatever. To me it never degenerated to the level of cliques or competing groups. But I think that the group was not strongly culturally united, you know around sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, or around Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. It was too diverse, and there was no attempt to try to bring that into the group.”475 The organization claimed several other musicians as members, including an accomplished classical violinist, and classical, jazz, and folk music all had followings in STO. Similarly, some members held particular interests in fine art, in sports, or in film.
Still, in the memories of many STO veterans, such musical and cultural interests were tolerated within the group, but they were not always fostered. Former member Hal Adams, himself a fan of baseball and classical music, later came to believe “that was one of the weaknesses of the program. We didn’t have much cultural life, to tell you the truth. The meetings were … there was no singing, or dancing, or entertainment.”476 In 1980, Phil Rubio lamented this as the price of STO’s intense pursuit of political education during the lull: “Now I’m proud of the intellectual strides we’ve made in the past two years—but now we’re so academic—what happened to our culture—the skits at the GMM, playing the ‘Internationale’ on the harmonica. Having fun?”477 In some ways, the intensity of the political work itself substituted for any sort of common cultural framework, even while it necessarily limited the opportunities for having fun within the group.
This scenario was common on the left in the seventies. As the writer and veteran of the era Max Elbaum put it, “if one word had to be chosen to characterize the culture of the New Communist Movement, that word would be intense.”478 In many cases, this resulted in solid and lasting friendships. Adams, for example, later indicated that “my best friends are from that period of my life; it’s not like we didn’t have personal relationships.”479 Given the high expectations placed on people, in terms of organizing, writing, and other political activity, it is not surprising that many cultural pursuits were sometimes informally mocked within the group, only to be pursued surreptitiously. STO never developed any official critique of professional sports, for example, but Adams remembered feeling like he had to be a “closeted [Detroit] Tigers fan.”480 In retrospect, he said, “I share an interest in sports with a lot of different people I knew then, but we didn’t share that thing then.”481 Thus, the cultural bonds formed by members of STO, even if they were overshadowed by the often all-consuming nature of participation in a revolutionary organization, in many cases proved to be more lasting than the ideological commitments that formally determined membership in the group.
At the same time, some members of STO did feel ostracized for their cultural preferences. Ken Lawrence, for instance, was critical of “spectator music” and advanced a political argument for “folk music and hootenannies and so on. You know, the singing movement of SNCC that I came out of.”482 This was partly an age gap, since most of STO’s members by the late seventies were younger than Lawrence and had been teenagers during or after the end of the sixties. For them, just as for Tony Kinman, folk music was a historical relic that did not speak to their cultural reality. As a result, Lawrence believes that popular music—“spectator music”—was in fact “part of the cohesion of the group but it was definitely alienating to me.”483 For Lawrence, and certainly for others as well, this only reinforced the overriding importance of political affinity in keeping the group together. As former member Lowell May recalls, “What I liked about STO was that there was an explicit renunciation” of shared (sub-) culture as the basis for organization, “with especially Don [Hamerquist] and Carole [Travis] insisting that it must be the political commitment and not the personal affinity that anchored a revolutionary group. Not that we didn’t develop multiple layers of cultural affinity—that’s why many of us are still close today—but the affinity grew out of the politics and not vice versa.”484
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While Lawrence may have felt isolated culturally within STO, he certainly contributed to the group’s awareness of the political importance of cultural questions. In issue number four of Urgent Tasks (Summer 1978), he published a long and wide-ranging article addressing a very different aspect of culture than contemporary music. In “Behind Tutankhamen’s Treasures: A Marxist Appreciation,” Lawrence takes the same Jamesian understanding of culture that Zeskind would subsequently use to assess punk rock, and applies it to review the incredibly popular exhibit of Egyptian archeological artifacts then traveling the United States as the Treasures of Tutankhamen.485 Focusing squarely on “the ambiguities, complexities, and contradictory features which merit a close look,” Lawrence’s review runs the gamut. It assesses, among other things: the choice of items in the exhibit itself; the aesthetics of the book-length catalog of the exhibit, which became a New York Times bestseller; the marketing of and mainstream media response to the exhibit; the politics of archeology as a discipline; the submerged history of class struggle in ancient Egypt; the geopolitical context of the then-current vogue for Egyptian artifacts; and the somewhat unexpected popular enthusiasm for all things related to King Tut.486 Lawrence even makes time to toss in a gratuitous swipe at punk, connecting it to the garishly over-the-top approach to color photography that characterized the marketing of “Treasures of Tutankhamen:” “Flashing strobe-lit dayglo posters and punkrock music are logical outgrowths of a culture based on this sort of hard-sell.”487
Lawrence begins with a straightforward explanation of the Jamesian approach to cultural questions: “because popular culture is a reflection of the status of the mass imagination—albeit shaped and distorted by the dominant ideas of the rulers of society—measurable changes in the cultural interests and activities of large numbers of ordinary people can provide an important index to the development of a worldview which has not yet emerged as mass consciousness.”488 For Lawrence, the mass appeal—and massive appeal, with more than eight million people viewing the exhibit in several cities over the course of two-and-a-half years—of the Tutankhamen exhibit reflected subtle changes in the working-class view of race relations, and “the degree to which the fierce grasp of racism on the white masses is being eroded.”489 More than this, the show’s popularity demonstrated a widespread “feeling that there is more universal significance in the African civilization of 3,000 years ago than in the mass culture of North America today.”490 The promoters of the exhibit, argues Lawrence, had no real awareness of the political undercurrents of their own efforts. “The bourgeois crisis,” he explains, “is expressed in its ‘art for art’s sake’ awe of the objects.”491 At the same time, “vulgar Marxists” were wrong to assume that corporate sponsorship of the exhibit, from Exxon in particular, guaranteed some correlation between reactionary politics in the present and reactionary art of the past. As Lawrence astutely points out, “the bourgeoisie’s taste in art is not limited to its most backward manifestations. It fears the revolutionary present, not the revolutionary past.”492
But this blind spot created an unexpected opening for potentially radical perspectives to percolate among the millions who viewed the exhibit, and the millions more who experienced its spectacle through the catalog or other media coverage. The sheer longevity of ancient Egyptian culture, lasting as it did for three millennia, “suggests a harmony between people and their environment which has never been matched.”493 “This,” argues Lawrence, “is the magnetic force that draws millions to the long lines waiting to see Treasures of Tutankhamen. The fact that they do not understand or articulate their quest in this way should come as no surprise given the torrent of propaganda standing in the way of a full comprehension, and the shortcomings of the exhibit itself.”494 Having already pointed to the complicated historical relationship between the undeniably black Kushite civilization in what is now Sudan and the Egyptian civilization that had been historically portrayed as “white,” Lawrence concluded his review by pointing to the future:
If we learn well, we will someday admire the accomplishments of [the Kushites] as today we esteem the Egyptians. At that point we will permanently part company with the bourgeoisie in matters of culture. By adding a coat of white-wash, the ruling class has found a way to absorb, or co-opt, Egyptian civilization as an acceptable ancestor to its own, thus predating the Greeks who were long credited with being the originators of all that is good in the bourgeois social order. But I don’t think they can grant the same status to undeniably Black Africans without calling into question their most basic, white supremacist assumptions. Nonetheless, the welcome the masses have shown to Treasures of Tutankhamen has taken them a long step in that direction.495
In retrospect, Lawrence was probably wrong to believe that acknowledging the historical importance of black African antiquity would lead directly to a rejection of white supremacy. Still, his detailed assessment of the interlocking questions of culture and science, history and art, race and class, publicly illustrated—at least to readers of Urgent Tasks—the best aspects of STO’s approach to cultural questions and the “personal” realm of human life.496
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The worst aspects of this approach, by contrast, were often hidden from public view. Like many left organizations of the era, STO used a range of internal mechanisms to deal with conflict and bad behavior within the group, and these methods were largely kept secret. A number of organizations in both the anti-imperialist and New Communist milieus utilized the “criticism/self-criticism” approach popularized by Maoism. “Crit/self-crit,” as it was sometimes known, featured intense efforts to scrutinize the emotional weaknesses of problem-causing members in a small group setting as part of a process of individual transformation that “was seen as an integral, if subordinate part of social transformation,” according to Max Elbaum.497 This method utilized sessions that were relatively ad hoc in their format, but which often used popular understandings of psychology to promote the changes in worldview and behavior needed for a full rehabilitation of the member accused of wrongdoing.
STO also made use of criticism/self-criticism, but for its own internal discipline, the group relied much more heavily on a method derived more or less directly from the original Communist Party of the United States: investigations and hearings for members charged with a range of offenses, including, in particular, political errors like racism or sexism. This approach went back decades. In 1931, the CPUSA staged a semipublic trial of a Finnish immigrant and Party member named August Yokinin on the charge of white chauvinism. More commonly, such proceedings took place behind closed doors.498 By 1935, the Party was utilizing a fairly elaborate set of procedures and norms to govern the filing and investigation of charges: “Charges made by one member against another, as a rule, should be made in writing,” noted the CPUSA Manual on Organization published in that year, which further maintained that “Every accused member has the right to a hearing before any disciplinary action can be taken against him. The main thing in the examination is to establish the essential facts in each case and to give an opportunity to the accused member to present his side with his witnesses and documents.”499
STO modified this procedure only modestly, despite the intervening decades, a fact that may have been influenced by the extensive background in and around the CPUSA of many leading members of the group. This sort of system was used repeatedly throughout STO’s existence to deal with a wide variety of problematic situations. The investigation of the charges was normally assigned to a small team of STO members, who then interviewed the accuser and the accused, as well as any witnesses (these interviews were sometimes recorded), and subsequently issued a report on the investigation that included recommendations on how to resolve the charges, including proposed sanctions against the member charged with wrongdoing. Finally, the membership was asked to vote on both the guilt of the accused and on the sanctions. One high-profile example was the vote on censure of several leading members for racist behavior at the GMM in 1977, prior to the split in the organization, as described in Chapter Four. This situation was unusual in that the charges related to activity that took place in view of the vast majority of the membership, and even more unusual because it was resolved more or less immediately by a vote of the assembled members, during the GMM itself.
Somewhat more common were charges of sexist behavior, termed “male chauvinism” or even “male supremacy,” filed by women in STO against male members, often as a result of actions that took place either in private or in a small group setting. Problems along these lines happened frequently enough that the group established specific rules to govern certain situations. For instance, by the late seventies it was formal policy that “when a member of STO who’s involved in a monogamous sexual relationship breaks that form, they are obligated to inform their partner.”500 When charges relating to sexist behavior were filed, they were often assigned directly to the Women’s Commission, which then had responsibility for impaneling the investigative team and subsequently for coordinating a vote of the women in STO (sometimes referred to as the “Women’s Wing”) on the guilt of the accused. While common enough to prompt rules like the one governing monogamy, problems of sexist behavior were still relatively rare, and when they emerged there was often some haggling over exactly how to proceed. In one case, for example, the Central Committee regarded the vote of the Women’s Wing on the guilt of the accused to be final, but argued that all members—including men—should weigh in on proposed disciplinary measures or sanctions. This latter topic was eventually subject to a “signed referendum vote” of all members conducted by mail.501
While the process for such investigations was generally accepted within STO, concerns were sometimes raised about their adequacy in dealing with certain problematic situations. In 1980, the majority of the Women’s Commission issued a statement arguing that “formal grievance procedures do nothing more but diffuse appropriate and righteous anger.”502 Lee Holstein, who was not at that point a member of the Commission, pursued this issue, comparing the process to the grievance procedure used under many union contracts: “It is certainly true that waiting to express strong feelings tends to dissipate them. The contractual grievance procedure in the factory is an excellent example of this. When someone waits, their immediate anger ‘cools off’ and the whole incident prompting the anger takes on a different dimension. It sometimes becomes embarrassing after the fact, even when the anger was completely justified. Details of the time become insignificant and frequently appear silly out of context of the situation.”503 Given STO’s lengthy collective experience in point-of-production work, it is somewhat remarkable that criticisms based on this parallel had not emerged earlier in the group’s decade of existence.
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Holstein did not propose a precise solution to this dilemma, but her analysis emerged in the aftermath of a major challenge to the group’s traditional reliance on charges and investigations. In early 1980, STO’s Internal Discussion Bulletin contained an unusual item: an anonymous, one-page, typed letter, signed “Phantom Pheminists,” which listed several instances of behavior by men in STO that the authors regarded as sexist.504 For example, “To the man who told a sister one thing he really liked about her is that she won’t rat on him for making insulting, male supremacist little remarks to her, YOU’RE WRONG. She’s no scab. WE TALK—WE ALL TALK.” Mocking their own organization’s analysis of the nature of the period in the US, the letter maintained that “a pig is a pig is a pig—in periods of revolutionary upsurge and in periods of temporary lull.” The letter ended with a call to continue the conversation it started: “Phantom Pheminists invite additions and comments.”
Comments were certainly forthcoming. The Central Committee, as well as numerous individual members of STO, compared the unsigned nature of the Phantom Pheminists letter to the use of anonymous mailings as part of COINTELPRO operations. Ken Lawrence, for instance, maintained that “the document struck me as a classic example of a well-known COINTELPRO technique—anonymous communications that attempt to exploit real or imagined grievances, especially personal ones.” Lawrence offered a range of examples from the publicly released government papers documenting the disruption of the left, and attached copies of several pages of the Final Report prepared by the Church Commission in 1976.505 He deliberately highlighted FBI attempts to destroy Don Hamerquist’s first marriage in the mid-sixties, when both he and his wife were members of the CPUSA. Lawrence was particularly concerned about the risk of broad distribution of the letter, which would have allowed its “use against STO by the women’s movement, with which we already have difficulties due to genuine political differences.” Not surprisingly, Lawrence defended STO’s standard practice of filing charges, and even proposed that the authors of the Phantom Pheminists letter “should be severely disciplined, perhaps expelled” for having violated the “proper approach.” In closing, he argued that “no legitimate political aim can be accomplished within a revolutionary organization anonymously.”
Anonymity did not last. Allison Edwards, herself a member of the Women’s Commission, soon took responsibility as the primary author of the Phantom Pheminists letter, and proceeded to defend it from the criticisms leveled by Lawrence and others. On the question of anonymity and COINTELPRO, Edwards and Linda Phelps (also a member of the Commission) drew an important distinction: “the issue is not one of an anonymous action, but of unnamed targets. To our knowledge, there is no parallel in the COINTELPRO scheme you refer to. Quite the reverse. Leaving off the name of the target protects his identity and gives him a chance to clean up his act.”506 But they also defended another aspect of this approach: “the ‘anonymous target’ method has a political purpose as well. When it comes to male supremacy, WE WANT NO MAN TO FEEL SAFE.” Edwards and Phelps also suggested that the initial replies to the letter had, perhaps deliberately, misdirected the organizational discussion away from problems of sexism in the group and toward the danger of police activity. More centrally, they defended the anonymity of the letter on another basis. Much as Holstein linked STO’s standard procedure to the union grievance process, Edwards and Phelps compared the filing of charges inside STO with the pursuit of criminal charges by women in and through the legal system. “As in cases of rape,” they argued, “reporting and being investigated is frequently more demeaning to the woman than to the man.” By comparison, the Phantom Pheminists letter was a relative success, to the extent that it prompted a continuing—and not demeaning—discussion.
But not all women in STO, nor even all members of the Women’s Commission, agreed with the position Edwards and Phelps put forward. Cathy Adolphson, the third member of the Commission, issued her own statement on the letter, supporting the linkage to COINTELPRO and defending the charges and investigation method on the basis that “without it there is no democracy.”507 Adolphson also signed a joint statement, along with four other women in STO, which challenged the Phantom Pheminists letter more directly. Describing it as “embarrassing,” the five women argued that “the content of the letter certainly does not reflect our position on what constitutes male supremacy.”508 Presaging some of the intense debates that would emerge among feminists over the coming years, they staked out a fundamentally pro-sex position as women, which they contrasted with the examples of supposedly sexist acts from the letter: “Eliminating the behavior described in several of the [letter’s] examples limits sexuality in a way which we oppose.”509 These examples mostly described fairly direct pick-up lines uttered by men in STO—“variety is the spice of life,” “you’re attractive enough to try for,” and others—and the five women laid out alternative readings of each, interpretations that emphasized the “sensible and healthy” aspect of open and direct discussion of sexual attraction. “As long as they are not violating the terms of their ‘primary relationship’ or being unclear or unprincipled in some other respects,” they argued, men should be just as free as women to initiate romantic encounters. “Attacks on sexuality,” they maintained, “particularly heterosexuality, are not appropriate methods of raising and attacking male supremacy.”
The five women acknowledged that there appeared to be disagreement among the women members of STO as to what constituted sexist behavior. “Not all sexual advances,” they pointed out, “are offensive to all women even though the line may have been crossed for some.” Reflecting on the interplay between freedom and responsibility at an individual level, they argued that “the choices exist among men and women to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to an advance or to challenge an offensive advance.” The alternative, which they believed to be implied in the Phantom Pheminist letter, was “routine organizational prying into these areas,” which they worried could lead down a slippery slope toward “a Stalinist operation whereby every action of every individual in every instance is judged correct or incorrect.” To avoid this sort of worst-case scenario, the five women suggested that “STO’s priority on the development of critical Marxists properly interrelates with an internal practice of combating male supremacy.” The trick was to “develop strong women thinkers and actors” within the group, which could best be accomplished by skill-sharing in more abstract areas like “debate, argumentation and political discussion” as well more practical endeavors like “printing, mimeographing and layout.”
Lee Holstein elaborated on the theoretical question of freedom and responsibility under oppression in a subsequent contribution to the ongoing dialogue. Here, she focused on “the dual character of victims/oppressed people,” where on the one hand victims are “victimized … killed, destroyed, harmed … dominated,” while at the same time “some form or level of desire to resist dominance, to not be a victim, is involved.”510 “In the duality of the oppressed,” she continued, “the oppressed/victim, believing she is a victim, will behave like a victim. When she behaves like a human she is breaking her oppression/victimization. So the oppressed is both victimized and resisting victimization. The former aspect is a fact and it is what the latter aspect destroys.” STO’s deepening commitment to autonomy as a concept (see Chapter Eight) was reflected in Holstein’s analysis of the “difficult but necessary ... qualitative change from a self-view which is externally imposed and internally reified—the view of oneself as inferior—to the realization and activation of one’s real self-potential.”511 At this point, Holstein had wandered somewhat far afield, but her examination of the philosophical complexities of responding to sexism on individual and collective levels was certainly in keeping with the original call in the Phantom Pheminists letter for “additions and comments.” To bring things back to a more practical level, Holstein concluded her rumination with a set of next steps, which emphasized the need for the women of STO to come to some basic agreement on “what is male supremacy” and on how to respond to it, both collectively and individually, within the organization.
For their part, Edwards and Phelps eventually came to have second thoughts about the anonymous nature of the original letter, though the rapidly mounting pile of thoughtful responses to the controversy around the letter spoke for itself. On the question of sexuality, however, they held firm. “We do not believe,” they wrote in early May, “that sexuality can be easily separated from the fact that women and men are not equal in this society.”512 After examining in detail the effects of pervasive power differentials on romantic and sexual encounters between men and women, they concluded that the pro-sex position staked out by five of their comrades was naïve. In embracing the open attitudes about sex that emerged from the sixties, they had forgotten that “underneath the ‘guilt’ about sex that we [women] discarded are needs for self-protection in an unequal situation.” This position was strikingly similar to the argument put forward by Andrea Dworkin, especially in her seminal work Pornography: Men Possessing Women, published the following year. Dworkin consistently maintained, contrary to extensive interpretation to the contrary, that she was not against sex per se, but rather against the exercise of male power over women, which was often disguised as sexuality.513
Given the historical failure of women to resist male supremacy effectively on an individual basis, Edwards and Phelps believed that what was needed inside STO in particular was a change in the “atmosphere” of the organization. The current atmosphere was one where, as Edwards put it, STO’s women’s meetings “were like regular left meetings, only without men.”514 Edwards and Phelps wanted the Women’s Wing to become “a militant and highly conscious milieu in which women combat male chauvinism, both individually and collectively, and, most importantly, one in which women support and encourage each other.”515 While this suggestion was certainly compatible with the approach taken by Holstein and others, it was clear that the rather fundamental disagreements about the nature of male supremacy, especially in regards to sexual and romantic relationships, were likely to continue. Looking back, Janeen Porter argues that these disagreements were at least partially related to the differences in class and educational background among the female members of STO: women with more extensive formal education, who were sometimes denigrated by other members as “bourgeois” or “middle class,” tended to identify with the women’s liberation movement in some form (although they routinely rejected bourgeois biases within the movement), while those from more stereotypically proletarian backgrounds, often with less formal education viewed the women’s liberation movement as less central and more alien.516
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Apart from—but clearly related to—the question of sexism in the organization, the other major issue raised as a result of the Phantom Pheminist letter related to children and the attitude within STO toward parenting. This was a question that had come up periodically throughout the group’s prior decade of existence. Marcia Rothenberg, who was a member of the group during its early years, recalls having felt marginalized within STO because she and her husband Mel were the only members at the time with young children. She remembers pushing for more family-oriented events within the group, but in her view the culture of the organization was not pro-family. In fact, echoing Phil Rubio’s assessment in 1980, she believes that in the early seventies there was no real culture to STO at all; certainly there was “no laughing together” during their time in the organization.517 While other members of the group during this and later periods would certainly disagree, the Rothenbergs were not alone in their discontent, and throughout most of the decade, only a few STO members were parents.
But by 1980, things had changed. According to Lance Hill’s estimate at the time, “over one fourth of the people in STO have children. Some still live with them, some don’t.”518 One side effect of the Phantom Pheminist letter was a new discussion regarding the appropriateness of active parenthood for revolutionary cadre and the extent to which child-rearing interfered with the necessary work of a group like STO. The question arose because some of the examples from the letter related to insensitive comments by men in STO directed at a single mother. Other examples were tied to a member of STO who was perceived by some as resisting (or shirking) the responsibilities that came with fatherhood, in the name of pursuing explicitly political work. The resulting discussion was illuminating, even if it failed to resolve the key questions. Hill began by suggesting that while young children could indeed be a “hindrance to political work,” they should not be “viewed as a special case.” Romantic relationships, for example, “are no more indispensable to human life than children,” and “STO has had much more trouble with love relationships hampering work than with children,” yet no one was suggesting that all members become celibate. There was, by contrast, an undercurrent (without any explicit advocacy) that children were a “bourgeois” “self-indulgence,” and this suggestion irritated Hill, as a revolutionary and as a father.519
Other members of STO extended the argument even further. Phil Rubio denounced the “double standards—people who begged off meetings or political work for ‘personal business’ (like rock concerts or hair dressers) were excused, but if the conflict involved a commitment made to a child, that was a different story.”520 Edwards strongly repudiated the idea that an active parent could be nothing more than a “movement sympathizer. The only way such a charge can be justified is by mistaking the most immediate, narrow, and short-range needs of STO for the needs of the movement generally, thereby creating a measure of one’s political worth solely on the basis of how much that person produces at any given moment.”521 As Paula Rubio pointed out, “children do grow up—and incredibly fast. I look at the years of being a parent as only a period of my life, and I intend to be as good a parent as I can during that time.”522 In this sense, the negative attitudes about child-rearing that were emerging in STO may have been reflective of the emergency response mode of activity that characterized much of the group’s anti-imperialist period. If, as the MLN proclaimed in the title of one of its pamphlets, The Time Is Now, then the time for things like parenting was clearly “later.”523 By 1980, most STO members had long since become frustrated with the perpetual crisis mentality that dominated the various solidarity committees the organization participated in, but this did not necessarily prevent people from unconsciously importing the same approach into other areas of work, especially when children were involved.
In this context, Paula Rubio considered the logical consequence of this line of thinking: “My conclusion over the years has been that STO is an organization for people without children—or for those with children who wish to put themselves through unbelievable shit because of them.”524 This helped explain why she never joined the organization, but her husband Phil, who was a member, was not much more optimistic. The family had moved to Denver, but he remembered their days in Kansas City, where “for a long time there was the expectation that you inform the branch (or at least the EC [Executive Committee]) before you had a child, regardless of whether your spouse was in STO. Otherwise, it was ‘unfair’ to expect other cadre to help do childcare when they had no say in its procreation!”525 Experiences like this led him to conclude that “overall, people’s treatment in STO of families has been pretty dismal.” Still, he had no interest in leaving the group. At the very least, he argued, “it is not bourgeois to want to have kids and still be a revolutionary.” In fact, he maintained some hope that their children might turn out to be communists as well, although after identifying himself as a red-diaper baby, he wondered, “Will STO have any?” Regretfully, he answered, “I doubt it—not at the present rate.”526
Several participants in the discussion advanced arguments for parenthood as a positive factor in STO’s continuing work. Phil Rubio, for instance, suggested that the range of new experiences involved in child-rearing “puts you in touch that much more with that aspect of working people’s lives that occupies so much of their time and energy.”527 Similarly, Hill maintained that “children are a source of human enrichment and enhance my ability to work politically.”528 Several people pointed out that the rigors of parenthood routinely force people to become more organized and more efficient, in addition to bringing joy to their lives and thus boosting their enthusiasm for political work. In this vein, Phil Rubio bolstered his analysis of the problem by arguing that “Kids are a constant reminder that you’re not here forever—if you want to leave something besides a bibliography when you go.” Drawing on no less an authority than one of the recently released five Puerto Rican Nationalist prisoners, he concluded, “That theme was stressed by Rafael [Cancel] Miranda when he spoke to a room of 400 people, mostly Chicanos, here this winter. You could barely hear him with his quiet voice over the din of the kids running around. One little Chicana ran in front of him. He grabbed her and said, ‘This is what it’s all about. This is what we’re fighting for.’” Rubio rested his case by chastening his comrades: “And don’t let’s forget it.”529
It is frankly unclear whether Rubio’s story, or for that matter any of the other polemics put forward in the aftermath of the Phantom Pheminists letter, had any lasting impact on STO’s internal culture. Certainly the organization did not collapse, a fate that befell more than a few revolutionary groups that went through similar internal conflicts during the same period.530 Over the coming years, STO would continue both its external political work, including extensive efforts around reproductive rights for women, and its internal emphasis on the development of what Holstein called “critical Marxists.”531 But this is not to say that all was well within the group after several months of internal struggle. In mid-May, one member of STO expressed “a sense of futility in this entire effort. The bulk of the organization,” she continued, “responded so defensively to Phantom Pheminist that the question of male supremacy in the organization and positive methods to deal with it were nearly forgotten.”532 This may well have been true, but at the same time, the whole experience was also reflective of the strain the group routinely found itself under as the mass upsurges of the sixties receded ever further in the past.
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In retrospect, the controversy stoked by the publication of the Phantom Pheminist letter seems like something of a tempest in a teapot. Several members actively involved claim not to recall much about the events a quarter-century later, despite the apparent intensity of the written documents that were exchanged at the time.533 Certainly the dispute did not keep STO from engaging in practical work in the outside world: during the six months that the controversy raged, the group provided extensive emergency support to the Puerto Rican independence movement after the capture of the eleven prisoners in Evanston that April (see Chapter Five). The group also produced two issues of Urgent Tasks, as well as the second edition of Workplace Papers, which was its largest and most well-designed publication to date and was part of the ongoing attempt to revive the point-of-production work that had characterized STO’s early years. Still, morale within the organization was not at a high point, between frustration over the solidarity work and the difficulties of re-engaging with factory organizing in the era of deindustrialization. Looking back, Noel Ignatiev argues that the difference between 1970 and 1980 was not that there were no internal problems around sexism or similar issues when STO was founded, but that the group’s organizing successes—and the overall context of popular upsurge—in the early years helped mitigate some of the stress that exacerbated the conflicts a decade later.534
Even in the moment, some members of STO attempted to contextualize the situation. Lance Hill pointed out that “the Soviet Union has occupied Afghanistan, Carter is on the brink of military action in Iran, the FALN has been dealt a serious blow, and we in STO are talking about offensive sexist remarks and broken marriages. Our troubles seem somewhat trivial when held up to the light of History’s volatile march.”535 But Hill still found real significance in the controversy, even if the lesson he took from it was different from the one Ignatiev would draw twenty-five years later. “We can grow,” argued Hill, “at the point at which we stop bemoaning these problems as typical of a lull, and begin to accept them as part of our tasks.… We have to eliminate the notion that these dynamic problems are a nuisance to the real work of the organization. They are part of our real work.” The priority on organizational growth was one shared generally by the membership, which was increasingly coming to grips with the disparity between the extensive amount of work to be done in a host of arenas and the limited capacity of a small revolutionary organization to accomplish the needed tasks. This experience was by no means limited to STO, as discussions of organizational “regroupment” began to proliferate within all factions of the far left.536 In STO, at precisely the moment of the Phantom Pheminist controversy, this took the form of a short-lived courtship with Workers’ Power (WP), a nominally Trotskyist organization formed from a split in the International Socialists.537 Nothing came of the discussions, and WP eventually helped found the group Solidarity in the mid-eighties.
Again, part of the context for these sorts of discussions, and for the issues Hill was raising in terms of the Phantom Pheminists letter, had to do with the sheer quantity of work to be done. As a cadre organization, and in keeping with many other groups across the far left, STO tended to demand an enormous amount of time and effort from its membership. At the time of the letter, for instance, the Kansas City branch was thought of as one of the least heavily burdened branches, in large part because of its distance from major centers like Chicago, where the demands of the anti-imperialist work were greater. Nonetheless, the same month the Phantom Pheminists letter was originally published, the Kansas City branch began to utilize a chart to record the responsibilities of individual members. Janeen Creamer’s workload, for instance, consisted of five areas: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), anti-imperialist work, women’s issues, STO responsibilities, and “ad-hoc” or short-term work.538 For TDU, she was responsible (together with three other members of the branch) for typing, layout, and distribution of an agitational newsletter; for writing an article on health and safety issues; and for “organizing women and wives, including car haulers in Lawrence [Kansas].” Her responsibilities for anti-imperialist work included the creation of a slide show and the task of “contacting people.” On women’s issues, she was expected to participate in STO women’s meetings and to call about deportation hearings for Iranian feminists. The “ad-hoc” work related to an impending speaking tour in Missouri and Kansas by members of an Irish radical group that had developed ties with STO. Finally, her STO responsibilities included being on the National Committee and being the national coordinator for relations with the South African Military Refugee Aid Fund, a group of antiracist and anti-imperialist deserters from the South African Army, which at the time was developing a political relationship with STO. The other members of the Kansas City branch had similar workloads. In this context, it is easy to see both how such a small group could accomplish so much, and why organizational growth would be a major priority. And, it is important to remember, Creamer’s list of responsibilities did not include one hugely significant emphasis for STO—the continuing tasks of political study, education, and debate that were shared by all members of the group, whatever their other organizational and political tasks.
* * *
If there was one single factor that drew people to STO during the second half of the seventies, it was the group’s intellectual culture. Not only was it rigorous and demanding, it also avoided the typical pitfalls of most far-left groups of the era, which had a rigid, or at least very clearly defined, set of political positions that new members were expected to learn and adhere to without challenging them. While it is important to avoid caricature when comparing STO to groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), the subjective experience of those who joined STO cannot be ignored. Hal Adams, for instance, later recalled encountering the group in the mid-seventies and being “taken with the quality of the discussion, the serious nature of things, the complexity—it was like nothing I’d ever been affiliated with before on the left. I joined shortly after that.”539 For Bill Lamme, the appeal as a potential member was the way in which competing views were allowed to contend openly with each other inside the group:
I was particularly attracted to the fact that there was a significant number of very strong intellects with good positions in the group. It was not a single-leader type group, you know, where everybody else is kind of carrying out the [orders] from a very narrow central committee. Debate was so wide ranging, and I had had enough exposure to that early on, that I thought, this is cool. This is cool, because I don’t have to say anything I don’t think, you know, I’m not obligated to mouth somebody else’s position. And what’s more, some of these people are quite brilliant, and I can probably learn a lot in this group. And the fact that there’s more than one brilliant person, that means I’m not just going to eat what one person is shooting out there because there’s nothing else. In fact, there’s a lot of ideas contending. I think that is part of STO’s greatness, as great as it ever was: the fact that it had some really outstanding revolutionary thinkers who were able to butt heads in a very constructive way.540
And it wasn’t simply the leadership of the organization that modeled this approach. As Ira Churgin puts it, “I don’t think there was any anti-intellectualism at any level. Nobody thought that it was bad to be smart, or that that interfered with work.”541
Still, the situation was never perfect. Many members had long complained about the dominating presence of a handful of intellectual “heavies,” who frequently monopolized political debate, whether intentionally or not. Hamerquist, Ignatin, and (after he joined the group around 1976) Lawrence were most frequently identified in this category, and all three of them were well aware of the problem. By the mid-seventies, they and the rest of the organization determined that something needed to be done. While STO, like most other left groups of the era, had long prioritized collective study of key political texts, the group took this emphasis to a new level. Around 1977, Ken Lawrence was initially assigned the task of developing an intensive political education course on dialectics. The explicit goal was to avoid approaching students as empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. At the same time, there was no pretence that all participants had the same level of understanding. Instead, the idea was to train STO members, especially newer ones, in the methods of critical thinking that were essential to the work of theorizing and implementing revolutionary politics.
Taking its cue from the Bolshevik study of Hegel and dialectics, the curriculum began by quoting Lenin’s observation that “People for the most part (99 percent of the bourgeoisie, 98 percent of the liquidators, about 60–70 percent of the Bolsheviks) don’t know how to think, they only learn the words by heart.”542 Of course there were clear limits on what could be accomplished in a single course of study, but the immediate objective for students was to gain “a functional ability to use Marxism. This is quite different from the usual introductory course which intends to convince the newcomer of the value of Marxism and to familiarize her/him with its terms and scope, but on the whole to leave the important decisions to the more advanced.”543 Toward this end, participants in the course were encouraged to continue their study, both individually and collectively, and to judge their own progress in the realm of social struggle rather than abstract knowledge. The dialectics course was intended to be “armament, preparation for battle. The test of that will be in our political practice.”
Part of what made the dialectics course unique was its combination of length and intensity. By the time the curriculum was published in Urgent Tasks in 1980, it contained nine distinct parts, which were generally taught more or less continuously over a fairly short time-frame. Hal Adams recalled years afterward that “people had to go for a week, five days or seven days or something, and it was all day long. Other people had to cover for your political work, you had to take your vacation time to go, and it would be in some rural setting. The materials were distributed ahead of time, and you were expected to read them. There were study questions and you would go over them.”544 The sections covered topics like “Base and Superstructure in Motion,” “How Revolutionaries are Made,” and “The Marxist Method.” Extensive readings from Marx, Engels, and Lenin were interspersed with selections from a wide range of other thinkers and writers, both historical and contemporary: Hegel, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs, Mark Twain, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, George Rawick, among many others. STO itself was represented by short pieces from both Ken Lawrence and Noel Ignatin.
A standard course had perhaps a dozen total participants, with roughly four “teachers” and eight “students.” This allowed both for the competing views among the instructors that Bill Lamme appreciated and for individualized attention for each new participant. While the eventual goal was to level the intellectual playing field inside STO, the dialectics course deliberately reflected the reality of uneven development within the group. According to Adams, for each session,
there would be one of the leaders who would be in charge of organizing the discussion, and people were encouraged to talk. They made a big thing that it wasn’t just a circle discussion, because a lot of what was going on in the left at that point was open circle discussion and no matter what anybody said, it was accepted as equal. And this wasn’t that, because there was stuff that was hard to understand.… So that there was a role for a teacher to play in the thing.545
The introduction to the Urgent Tasks version of the curriculum highlights this role with an example. In the first session, after reading selections from Marx and Engels, students were to be asked about “the fundamental contradiction of modern capitalism.”546 After rejecting two competing views on this question, STO’s official perspective is put forward as follows:
According to Marx, the social contradiction which can only be resolved by revolution is that between the forces of production and the relations of production.… Forces of production includes both capital and labor, while relations of production includes capitalists and workers. Thus the proletariat is an essential of both sides of the antagonism—on one side as the creator of use value, on the other as wage laborer. The contradiction is therefore internal and essential to the working class itself, and cannot be resolved externally. STO’s political line—in particular our understanding of the role of white skin privilege—is based on this recognition of the conflict internal to the proletariat.547
For those more familiar with STO, this was also a theoretical restatement of the analysis of dual consciousness that had been central to the group’s political theory from the very beginning. The problem was that this interpretation of capitalism’s contradictions would not spontaneously emerge within a traditional study group, because most participants (that is, most newer members of STO at that point) “are experienced leftists who have assimilated the various distortions of Marxism which constitute the conventional wisdom.”548 As a result, the presence of more advanced revolutionary thinkers was essential to the success of the course. Still, this distinction was always treated somewhat gingerly: references to “teachers” and “students” routinely came in scare quotes, and teachers were expected to continue learning themselves, even while they guided the study of the other participants.
In this context, one innovative aspect of the dialectics courses was STO’s decision to have students from one course become instructors the next time. This contributed to the education of the new instructors, and reflected the organizational goal of raising the overall level of intellectual skill within the group. Over time, the courses became one of the signature components of STO’s approach to politics, and word of them spread within the broader left. For a few years, the courses were even viewed as something of a recruitment tool, attracting people like Bill Lamme, who remembers being “a sucker for an intellectual approach.”549 After two years of largely internal use, the curriculum was published in Urgent Tasks, and subsequent courses often included sympathetic nonmembers as participants and even instructors.550 Lamme recalls that around this time, not yet a member but having already attended one course as a student, “I got recruited to [teach] some of the other dialectics classes, and in the process of that they said, well, if you’re going to be doing these dialectics classes, then it sure would be nice if you were a member of STO when you go around to these other places.”551 In the end, STO’s dialectics courses took on a modest life of their own, and managed to far outlast the organization that initiated them; in the last decade, several versions of the course have been offered in multiple cities across the US, with the help of a handful of former STO members. Certainly the course changed the self-understanding of many of the participants. Former member Carol Hayse credits Lawrence in particular with having insisted that he could “make theoreticians out of all of you.” Although she initially refused to believe it was possible, she acknowledges that, in fact, “that son-of-a-bitch made a theoretician out of me!”552 And she was certainly not the only one.
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While the dialectics course became the most widely known manifestation of STO’s internal intellectual culture, it was hardly the only one. By the late seventies, the group had a standing educational committee, which was responsible for coordinating a variety of efforts. Other multi-session courses were developed, covering topics like political economy, the national question, or the theory of “crisis” that developed within STO at the end of the decade. Shorter courses, often called “line educationals,” were designed to bring new members up to speed with the basic politics of the group. Occasionally, the organization sponsored larger educational conferences, which were intended to showcase STO’s politics in a framework that also allowed sympathetic groups and individuals to explore areas of agreement and disagreement. One such conference was held in November 1978, focusing on three main topics: the basis of bourgeois hegemony, the nature of the Soviet Union, and the potentials and limitations of national liberation struggles. Approximately sixty people were invited, including representatives of several anti-imperialist groups.553 STO’s overall assessment of the educational conference was positive. An internal evaluation afterwards indicated that “most people felt that the conference was a success in terms of our periphery—virtually everyone loved it, and some people were probably recruited from it.”554
One exception to the love-fest related to perhaps the most high-profile participant in the conference. In a nod to the growing Jamesian influence inside STO, Grace Lee Boggs was invited to present as part of the bourgeois hegemony panel. After years of close collaboration, including co-authorship of several key documents, Boggs had split from James over questions of political orientation in the early sixties. Nonetheless, she still retained much of the general approach that distinguished James and his circle. Boggs’s participation in the conference was subsequently described as “a disaster,” because she “made any sort of discussion impossible.”555 Apparently the sense of frustration was mutual, as Boggs quickly began circulating a written criticism of STO attached to the text of her speech. The group, she wrote, upheld labor struggles as the only road to revolution and “showed little appreciation of the way that striking white workers have time and again turned on blacks.”556 Given STO’s longstanding emphasis on this very problem, it is hard to imagine what aspects of the group’s participation in the conference gave rise to this criticism. It was also seemingly contradicted by Boggs’s simultaneous critique of the solidarity politics that characterized STO’s anti-imperialist period. Thus, to the extent that she was correct in criticizing the group for seeing themselves “only in the role of supporters, defenders and critics of the struggles of others, people in other countries and the oppressed in this country,” her accusation of a white blind spot in the group’s politics seems misguided.557 Indeed, for STO, the opposite problem—the romanticizing of black and national liberation struggles—was far more pervasive in 1978.
More believable, though still uncharitable, was Boggs’s critique of STO on questions of feminism. She was “surprised and disturbed by the absence of any sign at the STO conference that female or male comrades had been influenced by the women’s movement.”558 “Female comrades,” she continued, “said little and when they spoke did so hesitatingly, as if seeking male approval.”559 The group took this latter criticism quite seriously, and the internal evaluation of the conference included significant discussion of the low level of participation from STO members, “especially from women but also from men.”560 This was viewed as a particular manifestation of the general need for intellectual development that the dialectics courses were meant to address.
The remainder of Boggs’s criticisms, however, gained less of a hearing inside the group. Thus, for instance, her rejection of a basic theoretical tenet of Marxism—“we cannot understand the revolutionary age we are living in as long as we look at the history of humanity in terms of class struggle and economic development”—was diametrically opposed to STO’s emphasis on just these aspects of historical materialism.561 More valid in retrospect, but only slightly less incomprehensible to STO at the time, was her critique of the group’s continued reliance on the textual analysis of key writers in the Marxist canon: “[STO’s] attempts to fit contemporary Russia, China and the Third World revolutions into quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin reminded me of Ptolemy’s continual creation of new epicycles in the heavens to account for phenomena that could not be fitted into the theory of the sun revolving around the earth.”562 In the end, despite STO’s growing attachment to C.L.R. James, their brief interaction with his former cothinker was anything but fruitful.
* * *
STO’s internal political education process was punctuated by events like the 1978 conference, but the backbone of its continuing efforts was really the group’s Internal Discussion Bulletin. Publication of the IDB began immediately after the split in the group at the beginning of 1978, and nearly three dozen issues (many running over a hundred pages) were produced over the next six years. Certainly, internal debate had taken place in the eight years prior to the creation of the IDB, but it had always been somewhat haphazard. As a well-organized and fairly regular publication, the IDB rapidly became the primary venue for ongoing political debates inside the organization, featuring polemics on an astonishingly broad range of topics, from the nature of the period to the purpose of revolutionary organization. Most issues also contained minutes and reports from meetings of various internal bodies, such as local branches, working groups or “fractions,” and especially the National Committee, which was expected to guide political discussion within the group. Copies of leaflets and speeches authored by members were routinely included, as were written criticisms of STO’s politics and activities by outside groups and individuals. Reviews of movies, television shows, and books, both by STO members and reprinted from other left publications, appeared regularly. Finally, most issues contained a number of “clippings,” from both the mainstream media and the movement press, on a host of current topics.
Despite the serious business of revolution, the IDB periodically featured humorous content as well. The most frequent contributor along these lines was Ed Voci, who submitted a recurring column entitled “Light Stuff from a Lightweight.” The title was a mocking reference to the problem of intellectual “heavies” within the group. Voci’s contributions deliberately mimicked the style of newspaper gossip columns, mixing (often dark) political humor with news briefs and the occasional inside joke. In the run-up to Reagan’s triumph in the 1980 election, one entry read, “What is it that Ted Kennedy has and Jimmy Carter wants? A dead brother,” while another read simply, “A Kansas City member is said to have made quite an impression at the opening of the Crosscurrents Cultural Center in Chicago.”563 Humor also surfaced in many of the clippings that appeared in the IDB. One classic example was “Peter Rabbit and the Grundrisse,” which had previously been published in the journal Theoretical Review and was inserted without comment in the IDB. A spoof of the then-burgeoning academic trend toward Marxist literary criticism, the article was an amusing send-up of “the political economy of the cabbage patch.”564 Predictably, most of the IDB’s attempts at humor played off of political topics, especially in gentle mockery of the intellectual pretensions that dominated the rest of the bulletins.
It quickly became clear that the IDB was a useful tool in drawing sympathizers and fellow travelers of the group into its ongoing political dialogue, but this presented certain risks in terms of exposing too much internal discussion to the scrutiny of nonmembers, even those who were fairly close comrades. Thus, in 1979, STO decided to split the contents of each issue into a “regular” section, simply titled the Internal Discussion Bulletin, and a restricted section, normally titled either the “Special Supplement” or the “Secret Supplement” to each issue. These supplements were often labeled “For Members Only,” in order to indicate the sensitive nature of the contents, relative to the more broadly aimed items in the regular sections.565 The items relating to the Phantom Pheminists controversy, for instance, were all distributed via two “Special Supplements,” and part of Ken Lawrence’s anger regarding the initial letter related to the fact that it had been submitted for inclusion in the regular section, where nonmembers would have had access to it. (The long-time editor of the IDB, Ira Churgin, decided to publish it, but only in the members-only section.) Although even the Supplements were readily accessible to nonmembers (spouses, for instance), the security issues were certainly real in a world where—as noted earlier—government repression efforts frequently exploited internal disagreements.
Similar concerns grounded one other peculiar instance of security culture developed during STO’s anti-imperialist period. When Ken Lawrence joined STO in the mid-seventies, he did so effectively as a “secret member.” While he was well known to all members of the group (and many people in competing groups) as a high-profile and quite active figure in leadership, he was for several years routinely referred to in written documents as “Jasper Collins.” The original Collins was a deserter from the Confederate Army during the Civil War who became a leading participant in what has been described as the “Free State of Jones,” a small region in southern Mississippi that was a haven for anti-secessionist and pro-Union dissidents, including a number of interracial families.566 Lawrence lived ninety miles north of Jones County in Jackson, Mississippi, and was involved in a range of antiracist organizing efforts. When he joined STO there was apparently a general agreement between himself and the leadership of the group that his ongoing work in Mississippi might be compromised by public association with an avowedly Leninist organization with a defined strategic orientation toward revolutionary struggle.567 As a result, Lawrence used the name Jasper Collins when writing about topics with immediate strategic implications, such as the introduction to Don Hamerquist’s long pamphlet on White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question, but used his own name for documents of a more theoretical or historical nature, such as his review of Treasures of Tutankhamen or his pamphlet Marx on American Slavery.568 In almost all internal documents up through at least 1981 or so, he was referred to as Jasper Collins, or simply by the initials “J.C.”
* * *
One possible reason for Lawrence’s eventual abandonment of his pseudonym was the changing nature of STO’s self-understanding as the eighties began. The group that had been so strongly identified with Leninist party-building efforts just a few years earlier was now beginning to conceive of itself more clearly in terms of the autonomist politics then emerging in several European countries. Paradoxically, this shift meant that the group began to consider giving greater weight to its own political work than had been the case at the height of the anti-imperialist period. At the same time, as the various episodes in this chapter have highlighted, the organization was being pulled in divergent directions—simultaneously emphasizing the development of theory and direct intervention in a range of new social movements. As the Reagan Revolution got into full swing, STO continued to struggle with the politics of culture and the culture of politics, but it did so against a backdrop radically different from the one that had been present at the group’s founding eleven years earlier.
452 The date and venue of the Kansas City concert comes from the “Killing Floor Database of Bruce Springsteen Setlists,” online at http://www.brucespringsteen.it/Showdx.htm (accessed December 19, 2011). The description of this leafleting activity comes from recollections provided by Janeen Porter, Alan Rausch, and Randy Gould, all of whom were in the Kansas City branch of STO at the time.
453 These lyrics, which appear in the CAWI leaflet, are from the song “The River,” on the album of the same title, by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (Columbia Records, 1980). The full lyrics to the song are available online at http://www.brucespringsteen.net/songs/TheRiver.html (accessed December 19, 2011).
454 All quotations in this paragraph come from the partially illegible copy of the CAWI leaflet in my possession. Capitalization is reproduced precisely for the sake of accuracy. Thanks to Vic Speedwell for providing me with this document.
455 Randy Gould, email to the author, September 29, 2006.
456 The initial rise of punk on both sides of the Atlantic is skillfully chronicled and contextualized in Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
457 This view is attributed to Tim Patterson, a cultural critic for The Guardian newspaper, by Elaine Zeskind, “Punk Rock: Music in Search of a Movement,” in Urgent Tasks #5, Summer 1979, 1. For more on socialist realism, see C. Vaughn James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).
458 For more on Rock Against Racism, see Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1987]), 114–152.
459 Lee Churgin (Holstein), interview with the author, December 7, 2005.
460 Zeskind, “Punk Rock,” 1.
461 Ibid.
462 C.L.R. James, American Civilization, edited and introduced by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 119. While American Civilization reflects the clearest statement by James of his approach to popular culture, it was not published until 1993, meaning that it could not have been the direct source of STO’s interpretation. Ken Lawrence suggests that for STO the key text was actually Modern Politics, which was published in the US in 1973 and does contain an assessment of early popular filmmaking, including Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. C.L.R. James, Modern Politics (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1973) 134–137. Also, according to Lawrence, the idea of culture as reflective of the level of consciousness and struggle “was also a key aspect of nearly every lecture that [James] and George Rawick gave in the US.” Lawrence, email to the author, December 19, 2011.
463 Contemporary musical analysis along strikingly similar lines can be found on the website known as the “Democracy and Hip-Hop Project,” which explicitly identifies both James and STO as influences. http://democracyandhiphop.blogspot.com (accessed December 27, 2011).
464 Zeskind, “Punk Rock,” 2.
465 Ibid. Zeskind does note the dual character of cultural efforts in the sixties, pointing out that they “were partly responsible for diverting the movement into the dead ends of the counterculture.”
466 Ibid., 5.
467 Ibid., 4.
468 For more on this problematic combination, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 170–171.
469 “Interview: The Dills” [sic], in Urgent Tasks #5, Summer 1979, 39. The text of the interview and Zeskind’s article consistently spelled the band’s name—the Dils—correctly, but the headline of the interview added an extra “l”. For more on the general category of “women’s music,” of which the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective was exemplary, see Cynthia M. Lont, “Between Rock and a Hard Place: A Model of Subcultural Persistence and Women’s Music” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1984).
470 Ibid.
471 Zeskind, “Punk Rock,” 37.
472 Ibid.
473 Paula Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” in Continuation of Special Supplement to IDB #16, May/June, 1980, 27, in author’s possession. Rubio’s husband Phil was a member of STO at the time. I am grateful to Alexander Van Zandt Akin at Bolerium Books in San Franscisco for facilitating my access to this document.
474 Lee Churgin (Holstein), interview with the author, December 7, 2005.
475 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.
476 Hal Adams, interview with the author, August 4, 2005.
477 Phil Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 31.
478 Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 163.
479 Hal Adams, author interview, August 4, 2005. In this regard, it is worth noting that of the nearly three-dozen former members I either interviewed or corresponded with in researching this book, I contacted the vast majority of them as a result of personal friendships they have maintained with other former members I was already in contact with. (At the same time, I only interviewed a tiny fraction of the total membership of the group over the course of its existence.)
480 Ibid.
481 Ibid.
482 Ken Lawrence, interview with the author, August 24, 2006.
483 Ibid.
484 Lowell May, email interview with the author, May 16, 2006.
485 It should be remembered that Lawrence had known James long before joining STO, and had introduced James to Noel Ignatin shortly before the formation of STO. Thus, Lawrence (along with Ignatin) was largely responsible for bringing into STO the Jamesian influence that can be seen in Zeskind’s article, the CAWI leaflet, and other STO analyses of cultural questions.
486 The quote is from Ken Lawrence, “Beyond Tutankhamen’s Treasures: A Marxist Appreciation,” in Urgent Tasks #4, Summer 1978, 2. Interestingly, one of the only reference points left out of Lawrence’s article—Steve Martin’s April 1978 performance of the song “King Tut” on Saturday Night Live, subsequently released as a single that surged up the Billboard charts—has had perhaps the longest cultural legacy of anything related to the exhibit. The video can still be viewed in several locations on the Internet.
487 Ibid., 37.
488 Ibid., 1.
489 Ibid., 2.
490 Ibid., 4.
491 Ibid.
492 Ibid.
493 Ibid., 42.
494 Ibid.
495 Ibid., 43.
496 C.L.R. James himself apparently agreed. In September 1978, he sent a letter to STO saying he was “astonished and delighted at the high quality” of the issue that contained Lawrence’s article, which also contained an exchange on the politics of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, as well as a piece by Ignatin on fascism (see Chapter Eight). Writing from Washington, DC, James explained that he was “teaching a class on socialism and communism and the essays in this journal are the best I can think of for the work of a semester.” The letter is the first item in the IDB #7, Nov/Dec. 1978.
497 Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 165. The origins of “criticism/self-criticism” in Mao’s writings can be gleaned from Chapter 27 of the famous Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung (Peking: Peking Foreign Languages Press, 1966), which circulated widely within the US left during the sixties and seventies. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch27.htm (accessed January 2, 2012).
498 The Yokinin proceedings are described in some detail in Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983). The trial was conducted in public as part of the CP’s organizing efforts among blacks in Harlem and elsewhere. Thanks to Gregor Baszak for suggesting Naison’s book to me.
499 Both quotations from J. Peters, The Communist Party: A Manual on Organization (New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1935), chapter five “Rules and Methods for Disciplinary Cases.” Available online at http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1935/07/organisers-manual/index.htm (accessed January 2, 2012).
500 The policy as quoted is described in Cathy Adolphson, Janeen Creamer, Lee Holstein, Carol Loretz, and Carole Travis, “Fighting Male Supremacy: A Contribution,” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May, 1980, 19. Once again, I am grateful to Alexander Van Zandt Akin at Bolerium Books in San Franscisco for facilitating my access to these documents.
501 “NC Agenda” (n.d., but c. January 1981), 7. Again, thanks to Alexander Van Zandt Akin at Bolerium Books in San Francisco.
502 Allison Edwards and Linda Phelps, “Women’s Commission Response to CC (Majority Statement),” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May 1980, 5.
503 Lee Holstein, “Some Questions and Comments on Procedure,” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May, 1980, 29.
504 All quotes in this paragraph come from the untitled letter, hereafter referred to as “Phantom Pheminists letter,” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May 1980. This was apparently the second publication of the letter, with the first having taken place in the supplement to an IDB in February.
505 The full Church Commission report can be viewed online at
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIa.htm
(accessed January 2, 2012).
506 All quotes in this paragraph come from Edwards and Phelps, “Women’s Commission Response to CC (Majority Statement),” 4–5.
507 Cathy Adolphson, “Minority Statement of Women’s Commission,” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May 1980, 7. Lee Holstein subsequently highlighted this key value: “Oppression implies resistance. Resistance takes many forms. The form required in a communist organization has to be democratic.” Holstein, “Democracy, Marxism and Male Supremacy,” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May 1980, 24.
508 All further quotes in this and the immediately following paragraphs are from Cathy Adolphson, Janeen Creamer, Lee Holstein, Carol Loretz, and Carole Travis, “Fighting Male Supremacy: A Contribution,” in Special Supplement to IDB #16, May, 1980, 19.
509 The so-called “feminist sex wars” had only just erupted when this debate took place within STO. Within a few years, the conflict over questions of pornography, sadomasochism, and other aspects of sexuality would consume wide swaths of the (white) feminist movement in North America. The perspective advanced in “Fighting Male Supremacy” echoes arguments advanced by Ellen Willis in her 1979 essay, “Feminism, Morality, and Pornography,” originally published in the Village Voice and later expanded in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 219–227. It also in some ways presages the theoretical elaboration of pro-sex feminism in Gayle Rubin’s seminal essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Carol Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger (New York: Routledge, Kegan, and Paul, 1984). A useful compendium of critical perspectives produced in the midst of the debates was the special section of the feminist journal Signs in 1984 on “The Feminist Sexuality Debates” (10, no. 1, August, 1984, 102–135).
510 All quotes in this paragraph from Holstein, “Democracy, Marxism, and Male Supremacy,” 26. Similar arguments regarding agency among the oppressed were taken up by the feminist (and especially lesbian) philosophy milieu during the eighties and nineties. See, for example, Maria Lugones, “Structure/Anti-Structure and Agency Under Oppression,” in The Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 10, (October, 1990), 500–507, which advances a position similar to Holstein’s but frames it in anti-Marxist terms.
511 A parallel argument was advanced by Holstein that same year in a more public setting: in UT #9 (Summer 1980) she published an article entitled “Working Class Self-Activity,” which focused on the contradictions of class rather than on those of sex oppression. See Chapter Eight for more on this question.
512 Except as noted, all quotes in this paragraph are from Alison Edwards and Linda Phelps, “In Defense of Feminism: A Response to ‘Fighting Male Supremacy,’” in Continuation of the Special Supplement to IDB #16, May/June 1980, 1–5.
513 Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Putnam, 1981).
514 Alison Edwards, “Some of the Events Behind the Phantom Pheminist(s) Action,” in Continuation of Special Supplement to IDB #16, May/June, 1980, 13.
515 Edwards and Phelps, “In Defense of Feminism,” 5.
516 Janeen Porter (Creamer), interview with author, September 14, 2006.
517 Marcia and Mel Rothenberg, interview with author, October 12, 2006.
518 All quotes in this paragraph from Lance Hill, “Comments on the Phantom Pheminists Papers,” in Continuation of Special Supplement to IDB #16, May/June, 1980, 9–12.
519 It has proven remarkably difficult to find written documentation of explicit political opposition to parenting by revolutionaries, although it clearly was a perspective that held some sway both within STO and in other corners of the left. The relatively one-sided nature of my coverage of this question should therefore be viewed less as an unthinking reflection of my own biases (though those are in fact with the pro-parenting faction) and more as an unfortunate byproduct of a lopsided debate where the other side failed to defend itself.
520 Phil Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 31.
521 Edwards, “Some of the Events,” 21.
522 Paula Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 27.
523 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, The Time is Now! A Discussion Bulletin (n.d., but c. 1978).
524 Paula Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 26.
525 This and all subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from Phil Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 29–32.
526 My limited encounters with the grown children of former STO members suggest that Rubio was largely correct, if by “red-diaper baby” he meant children of radicals who grow up to be radicals themselves.
527 Phil Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 31.
528 Hill, “Comments,” 11.
529 Phil Rubio, “More on Kids and Politics,” 32.
530 See Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 255–258, which describes the collapse of the CP(ML) and, more pertinently, the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OCIC), which was led by STO’s old antagonist, the Philadelphia Workers’ Organizing Committee. The OCIC fell apart as a result of an internal Campaign Against White Chauvinism, which in superficial ways paralleled STO’s conflicts during the exact same period over male chauvinism. By comparison to the OCIC debacle, the Phantom Pheminists controversy was a model of civil discourse.
531 Holstein, “Democracy, Marxism, and Male Supremacy,” 24.
532 Cherie A., “Is STO Really Serious About Fighting Male Supremacy?,” in Continuation of Special Supplement to IDB #16, May/June, 1980, 37.
533 Author’s interviews with Alison Edwards, Carole Travis, Lee Churgin (Holstein), and Janeen Porter (Creamer) support this assessment.
534 Noel Ignatiev, telephone conversation with the author, July 16, 2005.
535 All quotes in this paragraph are from Hill, “Comments,” 9–12.
536 For more on regroupment efforts, see Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 258–266.
537 See Don Hamerquist, “Proposal to Workers’ Power,” in Internal Discussion Bulletin #16, May, 1980, 2.
538 The following information comes from a typed chart labeled “K.C. Assignments” attached to the “Decisional Minutes, January 6, 1980 [K.C.] Branch Meeting,” in IDB #15, February, 1980, 50.
539 Hal Adams, interview with the author, August 4, 2005.
540 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.
541 Ira Churgin, interview with the author, December 7, 2005.
542 V.I. Lenin, letter to Inessa Armand, December 1913, in Collected Works, Vol 35, 131, emphasis Lenin’s. Quoted in “How to Think: A Guide to the Study of Dialectical Materialism,” in Urgent Tasks #7, Winter 1980. In Lenin’s usage, “liquidators” referred to a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the period after 1908 that believed the clandestine apparatus of the Party should be dismantled (“liquidated”) because the opportunities for legal and above-ground organizing had expanded. In Lenin’s view this was a significant right-wing deviation from the proper approach to revolutionary struggle. Lenin’s letter is available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/dec/00ia2.htm (accessed January 2, 2012); “How to Think,” available online at http://www.sojournertruth.net/htt.html (accessed January 2, 2012). The curriculum went through many revisions, based on the feedback received after each implementation. Thus, the UT version is somewhat arbitrary, since both earlier and later versions differed somewhat from this one.
543 This and subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from the introduction to the UT version of “How to Think.”
544 Hal Adams, interview with the author, August 4, 2005.
545 Ibid.
546 “How to Think,” in UT #7, Winter 1980.
547 Ibid.
548 Ibid.
549 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.
550 The report by the Education Coordinator in IDB #21, January 1981, predicted that “between Aug. ’80–Aug. ’81 at least 50 non STO people who share some of our political perspective and who we have a clear interest in helping to develop theoretically will have taken the class.”
551 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.
552 Carol Hayse, telephone interview with the author, September 6, 2006.
553 Descriptions of the conference can be found in the National Committee Minutes for September 16, 1978 (planning notes), in IDB #6, October 1978, and NC Minutes for December 9, 1978 (evaluations), in IDB #8, December 1978.
554 NC Minutes, December 9, 1978.
555 Ibid.
556 Boggs’s comments were copied into the IDB #8, December 1978, with the following explanation: “Grace Boggs is circulating the speech she gave at the STO Educational Conference. The two notes below are appended to her speech and give her impressions of STO.”
557 Ibid.
558 Ibid.
559 Ibid.
560 NC Minutes, December 9, 1978.
561 Boggs’s comments, IDB #8, December 1978.
562 Ibid.
563 Ed Voci, “Light Stuff…,” in IDB #19, October 1980.
564 Rosa and Charley Parkin, “Peter Rabbit and the Grundrisse,” in Theoretical Review, #17 July/August 1980, reprinted in IDB #21, January, 1981. The article was originally published in 1974 in the European Journal of Sociology, and was reprinted by Theoretical Review.
565 It is worth noting that this distinction is still taken seriously by many former members, none of whom was willing to grant me access to the supplements, even though several of them were willing to share the regular sections. The few issues in my possession came through Alexander Van Zandt Akin and Bolerium Books in San Francisco.
566 For more on Collins and Jones County, see Victoria E. Bynum, Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
567 Ken Lawrence, interview with the author, August 24, 2006.
568 Some members of STO found this distinction to be vague and arbitrary, and found Lawrence’s use of the pseudonym to be unnecessary, if not pretentious. Kingsley Clarke expressed this position in an author interview, April, 2006.