Chapter Eight: Autonomy in STO, From Dialectics to Diabolics

Chicago, which remained the geographic and political center of STO throughout the group’s existence, was never more in the political spotlight than during the mayoral election in the winter and spring of 1983. The city had a lengthy history of highly corrupt politics, with the local Democratic Party maintaining tight, one-party control over the apparatus of government; this arrangement was commonly shorthanded as “the machine.” Richard J. Daley had been the mayor for twenty-one years at the time of his death in 1976, by which time he had successfully consolidated all operations of the machine under his direct control.656 City services, government employment opportunities, and other prizes were doled out to neighborhoods in proportion to the support Daley and his allies received at election time, with one major exception. African Americans constituted roughly 40 percent of the population but were marginal to both the economic and the political mechanisms of power in the city. Chicago also had long been extremely segregated along racial lines, and Daley’s administration institutionalized the sort of quality-of-life disparities that made the city the target of Martin Luther King’s short-lived northern campaign in 1966.657 Everything from garbage collection and building inspection to infrastructure and public schooling were of lower quality in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods. In short, the machine exemplified STO’s idea of white skin privilege, even after Daley’s death forced a necessary reorganization of control.

In this context, the sudden rise of Harold Washington in 1983 was shocking. Washington had been a successful black politician on the south side of Chicago, serving as both a state representative and a US congressman, but he had never run for any elected office in a district that was not overwhelmingly African American. Once he began his campaign for mayor, he received overwhelming support from the black community, but only token interest in white and latino neighborhoods. The two other candidates in the Democratic Party primary on February 22, incumbent Jane Byrne and newcomer Richard M. Daley, the son of the deceased former mayor, were both white and represented rival factions of the machine. As the contest heated up, the white left—both locally and across the country—began to pay attention to the racial dynamics, and overwhelmingly supported Washington. In many ways, the Washington campaign was a precursor to radical support for Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition” campaign for president the following year.658

But there were exceptions to this left enthusiasm for Washington. The Movement for National Liberation (MLN), which had always maintained an abstentionist approach to US electoral politics, resisted efforts to mobilize the Puerto Rican community in support of any of the three candidates, and did not make any exception for Washington based on his race or his political platform.659 A mayoral debate was scheduled to take place on January 31 at Roberto Clemente High School, in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood of Humboldt Park, and the MLN decided to picket the event in protest. Shortly before the debate, STO was invited to join the MLN’s demonstration. After a brief discussion, the Chicago branch decided to participate on the condition that it could distribute its own leaflet, aimed at progressives who were considering voting for Washington. The distribution of this leaflet caused a minor shit-storm on the far left in Chicago, as well as a major crisis inside an already weakened STO.

The leaflet itself was a text-heavy document, addressed “To Activists Who Think That Working for Harold Washington Is a Way to Build a Movement for Social Change.”660 It began with a sharp dismissal of those backing Byrne and Daley, noting that “support for either of them obviously means support for the traditional, racist, anti-popular politics that have prevailed in Chicago for decades.” From there, the leaflet took two approaches. First, it argued that Washington’s platform was politically indefensible because it was largely identical to that of his competitors, especially on issues of racism. “In fact,” the leaflet crowed, “we challenge anyone to delete the names of the various speakers and then determine, from the text of the debates, which speaker is which!” This was clearly an exaggeration, although Washington’s campaign did tack somewhat to the right politically in a (largely futile) effort to gain white support. Second, and more compellingly, the leaflet complained that Washington was running a very traditional electoral campaign that accepted support from grassroots and left forces without engaging in “genuine dialogue with any sector of the community.” It compared the 1960s campaigns of Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party congressional candidate Fannie Lou Hamer, “who ran on a program determined by open forums and discussions at the grassroots,” with the more recent and less encouraging experiences of cities like Newark, Detroit, and Atlanta, each of which elected “a representative of old-line official politics who happens personally to be a member of an oppressed racial group.”661 While the positive reference to Hamer evaded the question of generalized anti-electoralism that the MLN foregrounded, STO’s leaflet represented a firm criticism of Washington from the left.

The leafleting action drew immediate negative response from people both inside and outside STO. Three main issues emerged from the barrage of criticism. First, in the eyes of many, the leaflet failed to acknowledge the antiracist content of (white) support for Washington. Steve Whitman, a local white antiracist activist with strong ties to STO, mocked the group’s inattentiveness to the racial question by suggesting it change its name: “perhaps the ‘Jane Byrne Organization’ would work better as a name indicative of their politics.”662 STO member Bill Lamme criticized the leaflet for focusing solely on Washington’s stated positions instead of looking at the bigger picture of popular attitudes. Ira Churgin, also a member of STO, argued forcefully that “in Chicago today when a white person wears a Washington button, or displays a poster … it means, and is taken to mean, just one thing—that person is opposed to racism.”663 This dynamic became even more clear after Washington won the primary, and almost all sectors of the white-led Democratic Party machine suddenly switched allegiance to back the previously marginal candidate of the Republican Party, Bernard Epton, whose main redeeming feature was his whiteness.

Second, the decision to distribute the leaflet in the Puerto Rican community was widely criticized, largely because of STO’s all-white demographic makeup. Churgin put it bluntly: “it was stupid for a white group to go into a Puerto Rican neighborhood to leaflet white progressives about a Black candidate.”664 One prominent Puerto Rican activist not in the MLN wrote an angry letter denouncing STO for disrupting the efforts she and others were making to use the Washington campaign to “open discussions about racism between Blacks and Latinos, and how we need to unite and organize because in our unity lies our strength.”665 A major part of the problem was the vaguely defined target audience of STO’s leaflet. While Churgin and others inside STO clearly believed it was aimed at white leftists, the leaflet itself only mentions “activists.” Many Puerto Ricans and African Americans fitting that description were no doubt present at Clemente High School when the leaflet was distributed and could easily have perceived the leaflet as having been aimed at them. Of course, STO was only at the debate as a result of a request from the MLN, but Lamme noted that “using the MLN invitation to shield ourselves from such criticism is failing to take responsibility for our own actions.”666 As an alternative, he pointed out, “we could easily have found a Washington-only event in a white neighborhood within a week’s time.”667

The third main criticism of the leaflet had to do with its revolutionary tenor. While a majority of STO’s local members clearly agreed that progressive support for the Washington campaign was part of the rightward drift of the US left, there was internal disagreement on how to respond. Churgin accused his own organization of “Sparticist behavior,” referring to the small and hyper-sectarian Trotskyist group the Sparticist League, insofar as STO was “sabotage[ing] the work of other progressives because we disagree with it or think we know better.”668 This criticism no doubt stung, but it was inconsistent, considering Churgin’s own participation in STO’s long history of presenting a critical left challenge to a range of progressive organizations, from labor unions to women’s rights organizations to the MLN itself. Janeen Porter flipped this issue on its head, arguing that white leftists who supported Washington “use anti-racism to cover up their bad politics.”669 Churgin was on more solid ground when he suggested that “our effort was not really designed to raise the issue or encourage debate, but was our attempt to go on the record and keep our revolutionary credentials clean.”670 Certainly, as Lamme and others pointed out, STO had failed to address the significance of the Washington campaign until less than a month before the primary. This was especially ironic for an organization that prided itself on emphasizing attentiveness to black struggles, given that Washington’s campaign was the largest upsurge of organized political activity in the city’s black community in more than a dozen years.

In the face of all this criticism, the Chicago branch of STO spent significant time reviewing its actions and reformulating its position. Things were complicated by the fact that one leading local member of STO, Marilyn Katz, not only supported the Washington campaign, but was actually employed as its media director. Katz had been a founding member of STO more than a decade before, had quit the group shortly after when she moved to Los Angeles, and had subsequently moved back to Chicago, rejoining STO around 1980. By 1983, she was on the group’s Central Committee and had a leading role in the group’s relationship to both the reproductive rights movement and to anti-Klan and antifascist struggles. After accepting the job with the Washington campaign, she became less attentive to her organizational duties, and eventually took a leave of absence from STO. She finally left the group for good when it became clear that her enthusiasm for the campaign was not shared by most members.671 No one else in STO had a strongly pro-Washington position, though many—including most members from the Pacific Northwest—felt that his election would be basically beneficial to the regrowth of black struggles in Chicago and across the country. Years later, Bill Lamme remembers the appeal of supporting Washington as having been the excitement of potentially “winning,” despite the problematic content of the victory. In his words, the thing “that can always distract us from pursuing revolutionary activity is to get involved in a liberal thing that is attractive partly because it has a lot more people in it. And in this case it was more attractive because it looked like it could win, and in fact did.”672

Indeed, Washington surprised many by winning the Democratic primary, having successfully split the machine vote between Byrne and Daley. The focus then shifted to the general election, where he faced a surprisingly stiff challenge from Epton, who was backed publicly or privately by the entire machine. Washington had pledged to replace the white police chief, which led many white cops to support Epton, reinforcing perceptions of the police department as racist. The small but growing fascist movement in Chicago encouraged white resistance to Washington, but did not embrace Epton because he was Jewish. In this potentially explosive environment, the Chicago branch of STO decided to distribute a leaflet telling white voters not to support Epton, because “a vote for Epton will be a clear signal to Blacks that white people stand on the side of maintaining business as usual.”673 Still, the leaflet did not encourage people to vote for Washington, because “no politician, including Washington, is going to stop business as usual for the banks and corporations. To do that would require breaking the law. And politicians, including Washington, uphold the law.”674

The question of legality was in some ways the central issue for many in STO. After the primary, the majority of the Chicago branch adopted a formal position on the campaign, which noted that “the movement for Washington is not autonomous in any meaningful sense… certainly not from the state.…It is not militant, not based on mass active participation, not anti-capitalist or even anti-corporate, and certainly not class conscious. Its premises are parliamentary legality, ‘good government,’ interest group politics and class collaboration.”675 STO’s view stood in stark contrast to the perspective of many other leftists, who saw Washington as the product of a resurgent and autonomous black movement.676 Nonetheless, as the concept of autonomy grew in importance inside STO during the early eighties, the group focused more clearly on the differences between reform and revolution within social struggles. Illegality and violence were in the air at the time, despite, or possibly because of, the rise of Reagan and the New Right. Beyond the direct action tactics of the antinuclear and antiwar movements, mass—and seemingly spontaneous—uprisings dotted the landscape. Miami, Florida, in 1980, and Brixton, near London, England in 1981, experienced riots aimed squarely at racist police. Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other parts of western Europe were home to a growing autonomist movement for which squatting and street fights with cops were both commonplace activities.677 Poland was still under martial law as the Soviet client state attempted to suppress one of the most vibrant autonomous working-class movements on the planet, Solidarność. All these experiences, among many others, contributed to the maturation of STO’s understanding of autonomy, but its origins stretched back more than a decade, and were internal to the group as well as external.

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On some level, the concept of autonomy had been a defining part of STO’s political theory since the group’s inception at the end of the sixties. The idea of dual consciousness that the group laid out as early as 1971, in Toward a Revolutionary Party, implied a process whereby, through struggles in the workplace, the proletarian side of workers’ consciousness becomes progressively more autonomous from the previously hegemonic bourgeois aspect. Gramsci himself had described the worker’s individual process of developing class consciousness as one “whose elementary and primitive phase is to be found in the sense of being ‘different’ and ‘apart,’ in an instinctive feeling of independence, and which progresses to the level of real possession of a single and coherent conception of the world.”678 For STO, the purpose of existing as a revolutionary group (and eventually, it long hoped, as a revolutionary party) was “to discover and articulate” the independent instinct that Gramsci had noted.679 In particular, “the party must assume some responsibility for the translation of individual resentment and resistance into collective action.”680 While this initial understanding of the party’s leadership role mitigated somewhat against STO’s later embrace of the full meaning of autonomy, it nonetheless indicated the group’s developing analysis of the concept that would eventually characterize its approach to struggle.

An extended quotation from Toward a Revolutionary Party can help shed light on the complexity of the strategic conception that flowed from STO’s understanding of dual consciousness. After criticizing a range of alternative party building efforts, from the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Revolutionary Union, among others, STO lays out the fundamental basis for its own approach:

In our view, the primary role of the party in the mass movement is to discover and articulate the patterns of thought, action, and organization which embody the potential of workers to make a revolution. These patterns are manifested, embryonically, in the course of every genuine struggle. The characteristic content of mass struggle provides the only possible social basis for integrating the experiences of masses of workers into a coherent revolutionary ideology and culture. The real work of the party involves linking these fragmentary autonomous elements and socializing them into a new culture of struggle. This means that the party must emphasize and develop those forms of struggle which show workers the possibility of relying on their own collective solidarity and strength, not on capitalist legality and bureaucratic procedures; it must emphasize these programs which lay the basis for the unification of the working class. Particularly important in this regard are concrete challenges to the institution and ideology of white supremacy. Our perspective aims at the development of an anti-capitalist dual power as the engine for the transformation of the mass reform struggle into a mass revolutionary movement. This dual power constitutes a revolutionary social bloc that exists within the framework of capitalism without ever acquiescing in the legitimacy or the permanence of the social order. The development of such a revolutionary social bloc determines our conception of the nature and role of the party.681

Here we find most of the key elements of STO’s eventual “mature” position on autonomy: the idea that autonomy is implicit—if “fragmentary”—in “every genuine struggle,” the notion that autonomy is not static but develops in the course of social conflict, the importance of a “revolutionary social bloc” that positions itself within but against the “framework of capitalism.” The only missing aspect, the need for autonomy from self-proclaimed leadership, is implied in the criticism of other party-building models that formed the basis for the group’s positive conception.682 In short, working-class autonomy was part and parcel of STO’s revolutionary strategy from its earliest phase of existence.

Just as STO’s analysis of workers’ dual consciousness drew upon and concretized a belief in the autonomy of the class, so the group’s understanding of white supremacy and white skin privilege was always informed by an almost religious faith in black autonomy. Thus, Noel Ignatin, in his Portland speech from 1972, later published as “Black Worker, White Worker,” explains that “by Black struggle I mean the autonomous Black movement. I do not mean any particular organization, although a number of organizations are part of it.” Indeed, Ignatin was good enough to furnish one of the earliest working definitions of autonomy produced by STO, again in the specific context of black autonomy. By autonomous black movement, he writes, “I am referring to the tendency on the part of large numbers of Black people, especially workers, to find ways of acting together independent of white control and white approval, and to decide their course of action based simply on what they feel is good for Black people, not what serves some so-called larger movement.”683 In Ignatin’s definition, the complexities and ambiguities of the concept of autonomy come into clearer view. To be autonomous is to proclaim (or to struggle for) independence not only from capital or the state, but also from a range of self-identified leaders, representatives or comrades. In the case Ignatin describes, the list could potentially be quite lengthy: white-led labor unions, multiracial revolutionary parties, integrated civil rights organizations, not to mention bosses, landlords, social workers, school boards, various regulatory agencies, other government bureaucracies, and of course the police. Putting to one side the questions of corruption and racism, many of the listed entities would sincerely claim to be working in the best interests of the black community. For the “Black struggle” to identify itself as autonomous from some or all of these forces is a rejection of the idea that anyone else knows more than they do about how to change the world.

A parallel vision of autonomy, though less romantic, animated STO’s approach to women’s issues and gay and lesbian struggles throughout the late seventies. As has been clear, the group generally respected and encouraged the independent action of women against male supremacy. Still, it was always willing to criticize feminists who took bad political stances, especially on questions relating to white supremacy, regardless of any abstract claim the women’s movement might have had to its own autonomy from mixed-gender organizations like STO. Similarly, in its limited interventions into the arena of gay and lesbian liberation, the organization viewed autonomous efforts as an important form of resistance against oppression, but not as something above criticism. Thus, Alan Rausch, in his lengthy 1978 essay on the subject, “In Partial Payment: Class Struggle, Sexuality, and the Gay Movement,” depicts the history of the fraught relationship between Marxism and homosexuality in terms far more sympathetic to gays and lesbians than to the left. At the same time, he rejects any notion that “gay liberation is by nature revolutionary,” preferring to describe it as a “democratic rights struggle.”684 While Rausch’s essay sounds stilted to contemporary ears in many places, it reflected a relatively advanced position among Leninists at the time. However, the disparity between its critical treatment of gay and lesbian struggles and the kid-gloves approach taken with black and national liberation movements reflected the subordinate position autonomy still had in STO’s politics in the latter part of the seventies.

Around the same time, as STO began to emphasize the national question as a framework for resisting white supremacy, the group started to draw on additional external sources to defend its growing emphasis on autonomy. Don Hamerquist’s 1976 pamphlet White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question contains a highly unorthodox take on what had been a fairly standard Leninist parable: the story of the Jewish Bund. The Bund participated actively in the founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP, the forerunner of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in 1898, and had maintained a general autonomy “in matters generally concerning the Jewish proletariat.”685 But in 1903 the Party Congress voted overwhelmingly to reject this autonomy, and the Bund split from the RSDLP.686 Throughout the seventies, this story was routinely used by self-described multiracial revolutionary organizations as an argument against national or racial autonomy, but Hamerquist turns the argument on its head. He notes that Lenin had actually argued for the readmission of the Bund three years later in 1906, despite the fact that the Bund leadership was politically much closer to the Menshevik faction of the Party, which Lenin consistently opposed. “Thus,” argues Hamerquist,

if anything, the unique features of the Bund would have dictated against concessions in the direction of autonomy for it within the RSDLP, but the Bolshevik position was for substantial autonomy. Isn’t it obvious, then, that in situations where the national character of a people is much more evident than with Russian Jews (i.e. North American Black people or Puerto Ricans living in the U.S.), and where the level of consciousness and organization among the working class in these national groups is well advanced over that of white working people, the precedent of the Bolshevik attitude towards the Bund would certainly entail a large degree of autonomy and rights to separate organizations within the party?687

Despite Hamerquist’s enthusiasm, however, subsequent advocacy within STO for the concept of autonomy, whether for national/racial groupings, for women, for youth, or for the whole working class, rarely made use of this particular line of argument. This was perhaps in part the result of an ironic twist in the group’s trajectory, the split of 1978.

Little more than a year after raising the Bund in defense of autonomy, STO began the awkward discussions on third world autonomy within the group that led to the split in which the last remaining members of color left the organization. In practice, this represented the precise inversion of Hamerquist’s analysis of the Bund. One key complication of STO’s analysis of autonomy as a concept was that it was applied largely to movements and to organizations rather than to individuals. The majority position in the 1978 schism effectively held that autonomy was necessarily a social phenomenon to which individuals must be subordinated. Thus, the handful of black and latino revolutionaries who chose to join STO in the mid-seventies were criticized for having placed their individual preferences (for the sort of anti-Stalinist political conceptions that distinguished STO from most of the revolutionary nationalist organizations of the era) above the needs of “their” communities. Of course, as the splitting faction was quick to point out, such an assessment neatly mirrored the condescension that Ignatin had forcefully rejected only a few years earlier in his Portland speech, as if the white leadership of STO knew better than the members of color what those needs were and how best to meet them.

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Another major external source for STO’s ideas on autonomy was likely responsible for the refusal to see autonomy in individual terms—the impact of the European autonomists, especially in Italy, during the seventies. As was discussed in Chapter Two, the Hot Autumn of 1969 was one of the foundational influences on STO’s initial approach to organizing. Over the course of the following decade, the Italian movement went through a maze of ups and downs, producing a range of organizational forms and theoretical insights, always foregrounding the concept of autonomy. Interestingly, the Italians were themselves heavily influenced by the same upsurge of black radicalism in the United States that inspired STO. Thus, Potere Operaio (PO), the Italian organization that most closely resembled the early STO, argued as early as 1967 that “Black Power means therefore the autonomous revolutionary organization of Blacks.”688 Like STO, PO was “anti-parliamentarian, contemptuous of work within the unions, committed to an insurrectionalist perspective,” and like STO it went into crisis as the labor militancy of the early seventies receded.689 While STO was able to reconstitute itself on the terrain of anti-imperialist solidarity in the middle part of the decade, PO passed from the scene and was organizationally replaced by a plethora of smaller groups, collectively referred to as Autonomia. This trend participated actively in workplace, student, and community struggles, always pushing for militant direct action and resisting the attempts of labor unions, political parties, or anyone else to direct their activity.

As the decade progressed, autonomist ideas migrated northward in Europe, so that by 1980 there were self-described autonomist movements active in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and especially in Germany, where they took the name Autonomen. The influence of the Italian movement was also felt in Britain, where the group Big Flame fully embraced autonomy as a political framework and followed a trajectory quite similar to that of STO, from workplace organizing, through third world solidarity, to engagement with new social movements in the early eighties.690 Meanwhile, the major thinkers of the Italian milieu, including Sergio Bologna, Ferruccio Gambino, Mariarossa Dalla Costa, and above all Antonio Negri, produced a stunning array of written output, all aimed at developing the theoretical underpinnings for the concept of working-class autonomy. Quantifying and timing the impact of this body of work on STO is difficult, since translations of most Italian autonomist writings did not begin to appear in English until the end of the seventies.691 There had been some individual points of contact earlier in the decade, with Noel Ignatin and Don Hamerquist, in particular, maintaining communication with Gambino and others at various points in time.

By the end of the decade, STO had initiated the first in a series of delegated visits to Europe, where meetings were held in various countries to help develop an international tendency built around anti- imperialism and autonomy as guiding principles. Along with the Italians, the participants included Big Flame, the Irish group Revolutionary Struggle, and others. An international journal was planned, though it apparently was never published in English. This international tendency, like the US-based efforts described in Chapter Seven, was amorphous, although at some point around 1980 Noel Ignatin attempted to define “who ‘we’ is.” His definition spoke directly to questions of autonomy, drawing heavily on the rhetoric of Toward a Revolutionary Party, by then nearly a decade old:

The task of the Marxist organization [is] not to “lead the masses” according to some scheme of our own, but to seek out and discover those elements of the spontaneous struggle which are autonomous and subversive of official society, and weld them together in a revolutionary social bloc. This task, which is more easily accomplished in times of general upsurge but which cannot be left for those times alone, has two aspects: 1) the positive one, of linking the autonomous elements together organizationally, intervening to transform them from spontaneous to conscious, and drawing a clear line between these elements and the institutions and practices—trade unions, parliamentarianism, etc.—which mediate them; and 2) the negative aspect, of counterposing these subversive elements to the ordinary “loyal” patterns of behavior, which are also spontaneously generated.692

One notable feature of the European autonomist trend was its implicit assumption that autonomy was a social phenomenon. Drawing on this tradition, the contemporary radical writer George Katsiaficas suggests that “autonomy has a variety of meanings. Western philosophy since Kant has used the term to refer to the independence of individual subjectivity, but as I use the term … autonomy refers mainly to collective relationships, not individual ones.”693 This usage has roots in Marx’s Grundrisse, which begins with a broadside against the “illusion” of the atomized individual. For Marx, then, “the socially determined production of individuals constitutes the starting point” of all economic and social theory.694 The Grundrisse was a supremely important text for the Italian autonomists, and for STO, in part because it rearticulated the humanism implicit in the so-called “early Marx” of the 1844 Manuscripts, emphasizing the concept of alienation. For the autonomists, alienation was the flipside of autonomy, and both were fundamentally social rather than individual experiences.

Another element of the Italian autonomist tradition in particular was also imported into STO as it began its own autonomist turn: a millenarian anticipation of massive and fundamental social upheaval on the horizon. As the group began to reconsider its declaration of “the lull” at the end of the seventies, some members of STO introduced the concept of a “secular crisis” in capital, based again on certain passages in the Grundrisse that discussed the possible breakdown in the law of value that had always served as the bedrock of capitalism. Marxism has traditionally posited that the value of any commodity is a direct result of the labor put into its production. Hamerquist, in particular, was especially fond of the following provocative assertion from Marx, which seemed to suggest an impending change in the traditional formula:

The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in the face of this new one, created by large scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great wellspring of wealth, labour time ceases to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value.… With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.695

In other words, to the extent that capitalism becomes increasingly dependent on technology, actual living workers and their labor become less and less central to the process of production.

In typically dialectical fashion, this prospect implied a contradictory set of outcomes. By the early eighties, Hamerquist had come to view this prospect through a dark lens, speculating about possibilities of genocide (to reduce the supply of superfluous workers) and impending barbarity or fascism, should the revolutionary left fail to transform itself into mass insurgent opposition to capitalism.696 On the other hand, the crisis in the law of value could also be seen to herald the coming of a communist society, such that, for Marx, the prospect of machines displacing human labor carried with it an opening for “the artistic, scientific, etc. development of the individuals in the time set free” from work.697 Here, again, was STO’s understanding of the fundamental contradiction of Marxism, between the means or “forces” of production (technology, machines) and the mode or “social relations” of production (the slavery of the wage vs. the autonomy of the proletariat). Capitalism reflected one view of each side in this contradiction, while communism crystallizes an opposite view. Thus, in Marx’s phrasing, “Forces of production and social relations—two different sides of the development of the social individual—appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.”698 This, in short, was the secular crisis of capitalism.

Like Hamerquist and some other members of STO, the wing of the Italian autonomists led by Negri believed that the crisis in the law of value was actually playing out in the economic restructuring of the seventies, alongside the apparent rise in autonomous resistance to capital among broad sectors of the population. Thus, according to Steve Wright, a leading historian of the Italian movement, “while he continued to reject traditional Marxist conceptions of crisis, Negri’s own framework became no less catastrophic.”699 For Negri, the catastrophe was to be welcomed. Indeed, in 1977 he made the grandiose claim that “we are here; we are uncrushable; and we are in the majority.”700 While STO never approached this level of delusional optimism, there was a decidedly rosy aspect to the group’s view of the crisis, Hamerquist’s fears of genocide notwithstanding. At the very least, it was commonplace to assert the need to maximize the opportunities that were sure to emerge in the coming years. This tendency was especially prominent in discussions of production work and antifascist organizing. It built upon the perceived upsurge of mass illegality in hotspots from Miami and Brixton to Gdansk and Berlin. Hindsight makes clear the substantial misestimate built into this line of thinking, but the dialectical approach to crisis was a hallmark of STO’s theory of autonomy as the eighties progressed.

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In many ways, the emergence of the dialectics course grounded STO’s discussion of autonomy in a broader and deeper framework than had previously been the case. Instead of limiting the question to issues of race and nation, the group began something of a return to the broad defense of working-class autonomy that had characterized Toward a Revolutionary Party. This did not entail a rejection of the insights gained over the intervening years, but rather their re-articulation into novel discussions of class. A valuable marker in that process was Lee Holstein’s essay, “Working Class Self-Activity: A Response to Kim Moody,” in the Summer 1980 issue of Urgent Tasks. Moody was a prominent member of the International Socialists, a key Trotskyist group of the era, who had written a lengthy set of articles in 1979 on the Marxist theory of revolution. But Moody and his articles appear mainly as a foil for Holstein’s efforts to articulate a theoretical analysis of autonomy tied directly to STO’s longstanding critique of trade unions. “Working class self-activity is working class autonomy—autonomy from capitalism,” argues Holstein.701 Her problem with advocates of trade union reform efforts, such as Moody, is that they “mush together the reform and revolutionary aspects of resistance and insurgency, treating forms of resistance and insurgency which are confined within the framework of capitalism in the same way as those which break out of that framework.”702 For Holstein, by contrast, “self-activity is not just resisting and attacking, but resisting and attacking in a way that undermines capitalist power, destabilizes its institutional framework, and foreshadows and demonstrates, in the form and content of the current struggles, the potential of the workers to be rulers.”703 On a practical level, she maintains, this conception necessitates a “break with the trade union structures,” while on a more theoretical level it requires a careful attentiveness to “the working class in its humanness.”704

Much of the textual support on which Holstein’s essay draws is taken more or less directly from the dialectics course. She notes Marx’s distinction between the “class-in-itself” and the “class-for-itself,” and quotes extensively from Gramsci’s discourse on consciousness in the Prison Notebooks. She highlights STO’s conviction that the essential contradiction in capitalism is that between the means of production and the mode of production, utilizing citations from various key texts by Marx. At the same time, Holstein makes use not only of her recent reading, but also of her own personal experiences over many years working in factories, in particular when she uses a lengthy and thoughtful reflection on the contradictions of a hypothetical worker in a piece-rate shop to show how all workers, not just those who conform to left stereotypes of advanced or militant proletarians, express “both revolutionary and non-revolutionary elements.”705 While her specific reading of Moody’s piece comes across now as nitpicky, her holistic analysis of self-activity as autonomy was pivotal as STO entered the eighties.

One practical form taken by this reframing of autonomy in terms of class was the abortive attempt to reinvigorate STO’s workplace organizing efforts. This effort had been approved at the General Membership Meeting in 1979, but stalled repeatedly for a number of reasons. Deindustrialization was making it harder for members to obtain work in factories, especially in the heavy industries (steel, auto, etc.) that had been STO’s previous areas of concentration. However, even where a number of members were involved in production work, as in Kansas City, there were problems. The union reform efforts the group had long disparaged were showing some limited signs of immediate success, which made it more difficult for STO’s critique of unions to gain a hearing among workers. This was especially true among those workers most inclined toward organizing in the shop, since they were drawn to the prospect of victory that reform movements like Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) represented. STO members in Kansas City and elsewhere carried on an uneasy relationship with TDU for a period of time at the turn of the decade, but in this effort they always faced resistance within STO as well as within TDU, which was one of the International Socialists’ (IS) key targets for organizing.706 Eventually, it became clear that work with TDU was unlikely to produce the sort of growing radicalization of workers that STO believed was both desirable and increasingly possible.

Over the course of 1981, another attempt was made to kick-start the “Production Fraction,” as it was known. The new proposal called for the creation of a general workers’ organization, as opposed to the sort of site-specific factory committees that had been the hallmark of STO’s original workplace efforts. Kansas City branch member and factory worker Janeen Creamer wanted the group “to build a city-wide, multi-national, class-conscious, hell-raising, ass-kicking group of working-class people who view themselves as organizers.”707 The proposal was to cohere a core of insurgent workers who could advance a solidly revolutionary response to the economic crisis that dominated STO’s estimate of the period. A key veteran of the early years and a longtime auto worker, Carole Travis, pointed to the needed tactical shift: “Our old methods of shop floor work are not now relevant. Building shop floor organization reflective of particular plant or department grievances cannot be at the heart of our organizing now. Those techniques incorrectly emphasize struggles which are neither central nor winnable as isolated struggles.”708 Instead, Travis and others wanted to establish a more proletarian version of the various social movements that had taken up so much of STO’s time since the late seventies. Most activities of such a group would happen outside the workplace, either through demonstrations or through small-scale militant direct actions. As an example, Travis suggested a focus on the problems of the economic crisis, especially the rise of far-right and Klan forces among unemployed and underemployed white workers, as well as some predictable foreign policy issues.

For Creamer and for Travis, as for others, the key aspect of any such organization was its autonomy, not only from capitalism but from STO itself. Travis warned that “our work should not degenerate into pressuring or manipulating people. Activity and projects of the group as a whole, once it becomes a whole, must be determined by it.”709 But the heightened emphasis on autonomy drew some complaints from inside STO, even before the proposal could be initiated. Lowell May, for instance, argued that “we’re expecting to organize advanced workers without the benefit of a sufficient anti-imperialist/anti-white supremacist context. What will produce the revolutionary consciousness (as opposed to militant oppressor nation worker consciousness)? Not us. Even without the commitment to autonomy, we couldn’t do it.”710 May’s phrasing suggests he thought the group’s interest in autonomy was a burden, but mostly he was interested in highlighting its one-sidedness in the absence of a resurgent black radicalism, inside or outside the ever-shrinking factories. In any event, the proposal, as with so many of STO’s initiatives during its declining years, came to naught. While individual members of STO continued to work in factory settings throughout the rest of the group’s existence, it would never again mount a meaningful campaign that focused squarely on efforts to organize the working class.

* * *

STO’s failure to reinvigorate its production work was also reflective of a recurrent element of STO’s commitment to autonomy: a form of organizational self-deprecation. Because it was an overwhelmingly (at times, exclusively) white organization, the group’s early realization of its own potentially antagonistic role relative to the black liberation movement was permanently humbling. It was precisely this respect for black autonomy that led the group to decide in its early years against the recruitment of close comrades such as the black communist Macee Halk.711 The issue went beyond just race relations, however, and broached the question of working-class autonomy. For the most part, the group was always loathe to recruit as new members militants (of whatever color) encountered in the context of mass struggle, whether on the shop floor or in the antinuclear movement. When the group’s internal crisis began in the early eighties, as described in Chapter Seven, the membership focused on both practical questions—poor communication between the Central Committee and the branches, for instance—and more theoretical issues—the tension between left and mass work, for example. Many of these factors no doubt contributed to the growing organizational frustrations, but what is striking in the group’s surfeit of otherwise thoughtful reflections and proposals is the total absence of any reference to STO’s growing attachment to autonomy. Certainly, the idea of autonomy as formulated by STO and others was an important counterweight to the tendency toward authoritarianism that had plagued the Marxist tradition in all its many variants. But for a group whose cohesion had always been framed by a Leninist commitment to building a true revolutionary party, the shift toward autonomy certainly exacerbated the problems of organizational drift.

These contradictions were on full display in a paper written by Noel Ignatin at the beginning of 1983. In “For Autonomism,” Ignatin drew an important distinction between the broad trend within black radicalism toward “autonomism,” defined as “the general tendency which regards an independent black movement as a strategic principle,” and black nationalism as a narrower trend toward creation of an independent nation-state.712 Though STO had long prioritized support for revolutionary nationalism, it was clear by the early eighties that a majority of the group’s membership had fundamental political differences with the dominant tendencies within the black nationalist milieu. In that sense, Ignatin’s paper pointed to a real shift in STO’s political strategy as a result of the growing importance of autonomy within the group. At the same time, the paper represented something of a throwback to the early seventies, when STO pamphlets like The United Front Against Imperialism? flirted with a fully romanticized vision of the black freedom struggle. In the new era, however, Ignatin—no doubt reflecting on the frustrations of working with the Puerto Rican independence movement—was suggesting that revolutionary nationalism was potentially a barrier to autonomy rather than its standard-bearer. This was yet another sign of the ways in which the growing pull of autonomy was shattering previously undisputed components of STO’s analysis. But again, “For Autonomism” limited itself to addressing the implications of autonomy for the black movement, and failed to address the ways in which a commitment to autonomy was changing STO itself.

* * *

Autonomy as a concept did not only apply to the political left, and over time STO came to view the threat of fascism through a lens of autonomy as well. For a number of years, the group’s unified approach to fascism provided a counterweight to the mounting frustrations of tendency building. Fascism presented both a theoretical challenge and a physical danger to committed revolutionaries at the turn of the eighties, especially in the deep South, where the Klan was well organized and highly violent. Certainly the most chilling example was the massacre of five members of the newly minted Communist Workers Party (CWP, formerly the Workers’ Voice Organization, a Maoist outgrowth of the New Communist Movement) by Klansmen and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina on December 3, 1979.713 While STO was harshly critical of the politics of the CWP, including its analysis of fascism as a transparent tool of the capitalist system, it recognized certain common risks resulting from the emphasis on direct action-oriented antifascist organizing that characterized both groups despite their divergent trajectories.

Much of the US left at the end of the seventies rejected this emphasis, arguing that the danger of fascism was exaggerated and that antifascism was a distraction from more essential work around labor struggles or race relations.714 Indeed, STO itself had long held an almost identical position. In 1976, the group had published a discussion paper (originally written in 1974) by Don Hamerquist entitled “Fascism in the U.S.?” Written as an intervention in debates around the role and strategy of the National Lawyers Guild, Hamerquist’s piece presented a fairly straightforward argument with implications well beyond the practice of left-wing attorneys. The essay begins with an acceptance of the common Marxist assumption that fascism represents “the course of desperation for the ruling class, a course only taken in the event of the failure of the bourgeois democratic forms of rule which have worked in this country since its beginnings.”715 While STO was later to challenge this premise in favor of emphasizing the autonomous potential of fascist movements, Hamerquist was more focused on proving that capitalism in the US was unlikely to embrace fascism anytime soon. If fascism represented a last-ditch response to a rising tide of left revolutionary sentiment, then the unmistakable decline of the radical movements that had rocked the country during the late sixties was all the evidence required to support Hamerquist’s argument.

The analysis went deeper, and (unsurprisingly) related back directly to STO’s theory of white supremacy and white skin privilege. In this regard, Hamerquist counters the “imminent fascism” thesis by pointing to the ways in which white supremacy was woven into the very fabric of “bourgeois democracy.” The repressive terror associated with fascism, he argues, has long been characteristic of the daily life of people of color in the United States, especially in their dealings with the police and state bureaucracies. Nonetheless, “despite the fascistic aspects of the oppression of Third World people, in fact, national oppression and its manifestation in the institution of white supremacy are essential and defining features of US capitalist—that is, of WHITE SUPREMACIST bourgeois democratic rule, the only “democracy” which has ever existed in this country with the exception of a brief period in the South following the Civil War.”716 What is more, “to a large degree, bourgeois democracy in this country is a white privilege.”717 After briefly restating STO’s longstanding perspective on the role of white skin privilege in dividing the working class, Hamerquist returns to the question of fascism. “So long as the bulk of the white working class sees its interests mainly in terms of skin color, not class position, the likelihood of fascist rule being extended to the society as a whole is minimal.”718 With the status quo functioning successfully, there was no incentive for the ruling class to pursue fascism as a policy option.

Hamerquist concludes his polemic with an assessment of the strategic implications of the competing analyses of fascism. Those who argue that fascism is imminent, he maintains, are really looking for a way to avoid the hard work of challenging white supremacy within the white working class. In this scenario, “the approach to white workers is not to attempt to win them to a stand of class solidarity with oppressed peoples, but to convince them that they are next on the list.”719 It was no surprise to those familiar with STO’s politics that Hamerquist rejected this strategy as an inherently doomed attempt at shortcutting the hard work of defeating white supremacy within the working class. At the time (1974), this was consistent with STO’s emphasis on direct organizing at the point of production. As the decade progressed and the group focused its efforts on anti-imperialist solidarity, the specific critique of the “imminent fascism” theory was subsumed in a more general political shift. The real-world result for STO was a general failure to engage in explicit antifascist organizing efforts for most of the seventies, until shortly before the Greensboro massacre.

The gradual move toward a conceptual emphasis on autonomy led STO to reconsider its approach to fascism and antifascism, a process that was accelerated by the difficulty (and, to a lesser extent, danger) experienced by Ken Lawrence in Mississippi as he attempted to develop and maintain connections with a range of black and other radical groups that faced sustained harassment by a newly resurgent Ku Klux Klan. In some ways, Noel Ignatin began the theoretical shift with an important article published in Urgent Tasks in 1978, entitled “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions.” In it, Ignatin challenges many standard left assumptions about fascism, most prominently the famous definition put forward by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1933: “Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”720 By contrast, argues Ignatin, fascism must be understood to have its own dynamic, quite apart from the supposed desire of some sections of capital to establish dictatorial control over society. Thus, “it is necessary to recognize the relative autonomy of the fascist movement in relation to all classes, as an important feature that distinguishes it from other rightwing governments.”721 Ignatin goes on to offer a set of hypothetical examples designed to demonstrate the potential (if not actual) autonomy of fascism as a political movement in periods prior to a seizure of power.

Around the same time, Ken Lawrence and many other southern revolutionaries were receiving threats of physical violence from various Klan factions across the region. While this experience prompted many of the targeted radicals to identify the Klan as a proxy for state repression on the model of COINTELPRO, Lawrence took another tack. He focused on the growing interaction between the uniquely “American” Klan milieu and the previously distinct tradition of European-influenced fascism. In this context, the fact that Klan and neo-Nazi groups had themselves been the targets of COINTELPRO operations was indicative of their actual autonomy from the state, at least at the level of the federal government.722 Similar conclusions were drawn by other STO members based on local experiences in Kansas City and Chicago, and rather quickly the organization had developed a coherent and rather unorthodox analysis of fascism. As Lawrence put it, “we have correctly identified the distinguishing characteristics of fascism as its autonomous, mass, plebian qualities; its ‘revolutionary’ vision; and its own brand of ‘internationalism,’ or at least super-nationalism.”723

For STO, the obvious parallel to divisions on the far right were those on the far left, especially the contrast between revolution and reform that informed the group’s response to the Harold Washington campaign. A similar tension manifested in right-wing contexts like the anti-abortion movement, between those who focused on legislative efforts and those who emphasized illegal activities like bombing clinics. This assessment influenced a growing belief inside STO that the main danger of fascism was that its radicalism and militancy was gaining it adherents in precisely the place that STO had long prioritized: the white working class. Lawrence again framed the group’s changing view: “the question arose as to whether we are in competition with the fascists for the same constituency. On reflection I would say the entire discussion was pretty naïve, because the answer is a resounding yes on every level, but the fact that this answer wasn’t instantly obvious is not so much a failure to grasp our political aims as it is a failure to understand the strength of the Klan/Nazi ideology.”724 The biggest outcome of this realization was the major investment STO put into antifascist work during the early eighties. The group was heavily involved in building two different nationwide anti-Klan organizations, the National Anti-Klan Network (NAKN) and a group with the rather unwieldy name People United Against Government Repression and the Klan and Nazi Coalition. On a local level STO members were active in a range of antifascist efforts, including direct action responses to Klan and neo-Nazi rallies.

Still, the situation was complicated: in the aftermath of the Greensboro massacre, for instance, it became clear that there was substantial interaction between law enforcement and the Klan and neo-Nazi groups. This realization invariably raised the question of how to interact with the government in the process of organizing against the fascists. For some in the burgeoning antifascist movement, the obvious response was to reject any alliance with the state because of the two-faced role police were known to play. STO broadly encouraged this perspective, not least because of its fear that the fascists might successfully portray the antifascists as hopelessly reformist and compromised by their dependence on the state. Still, even within STO there were debates on how to address this question. In 1981, for instance, a dispute emerged in Kansas City over two competing slogans for use in antifascist work: “smash the Klan” and “ban the Klan.” The former was perceived as opposing “any call for any reliance on the state in the struggle against the Klan.”725 According to Randy Gould, “the danger of the ‘Ban the Klan’ approach is that it does not allow Blacks or working people to build their own organizations for their own struggles under their own control, and more that it implies that the State can take care of the Klan for us, will take care of the Klan for us, can and will be fair and anti-racist. Of course we know that this is not the case at all. It is dangerous to spread such an illusion.”726 Regardless, others in STO argued that it was harmfully sectarian to forcefully exclude the “ban the Klan” approach. Certainly, the NAKN was open to “ban the Klan” strategies, and STO was actively involved in what Lawrence identified as “the largest and potentially most influential of the various anti-fascist coalitions.”727 But Gould and others questioned the political value of such national work, emphasizing instead local direct action-based efforts, where it was often easier to convince people to adopt more militant stances based on goodwill accumulated over years of joint work.

Issues such as these were the subject of extensive debate inside STO, leading to the approval of a set of “Theses on Fascism” at the General Membership Meeting in 1981. Subsequently published in Urgent Tasks, the theses focus primarily on the character of the fascist movement, and only secondarily on the question of antifascist organizing. Thesis number three locates the basis of the emerging fascist threat in the ongoing economic crisis (whether “secular” or “cyclical”), while thesis number four cautions that

To understand fascism as growing out of the crises endemic to capitalism is not to say that it is a simple tool of the capitalist class. One important element in fascism is its autonomous character, expressed in a mass movement among sectors of the population who have been dislocated by the capitalist crisis and alienated from the traditional institutions of conciliation and repression. Fascism contains an anti-capitalist ‘revolutionary’ side that is not reducible to simple demagogy.728

Yet STO was careful to reiterate that this autonomy only represented one aspect of fascism. In an accompanying “Note on the Theses,” Ignatin pointed to the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity between fascism and traditional conservative forces in the US. As he put it, “from conservatism to fascism there is both a continuum and a break, and it is necessary to keep both in mind.”729

The theses argue for a reformulation of the classic Leninist idea of the “United Front” as the key strategic concept in antifascist organizing. Thesis number eight defines the United Front as “a defensive posture aimed at achieving an alliance for the sole purpose of stopping the fascist advance.”730 While the United Front would necessarily be broad, STO hoped to build a pole within it that could

criticize certain incorrect approaches which currently hold sway. Foremost among these are: first, the view that it is possible to defeat fascism through reliance on liberal, constitutional sectors of the bourgeoisie and their representatives in the popular movement; second, the view that holds fascism and the bourgeois state to be identical, therefore overlooking the autonomous character of the fascist movement which is an important source of its dangerous potential.731

This amounted to a specific application of the group’s tendency-building approach, with the tendency defined by reference to its revolutionary opposition to both fascism and the liberal, capitalist state. Just as the fascists struggled to maintain their autonomy from the conservative mainstream, so must the antifascist milieu.

The theses managed to paper over at least one set of disagreements within STO around fascism: the question of anti-Semitism. Thesis number seven emphasized the centrality of anti-Semitism to the developing fascist threat, but Ignatin’s “Comment” argued that “To the extent that fascism establishes its independence from the bourgeoisie as a whole, to that extent it is likely that anti-Semitism will diminish in importance within the fascist program.”732 The next issue of Urgent Tasks published an exchange on this topic between Ignatin and Lenny Zeskind, a longtime STO member from Kansas City and a leading figure in the group’s antifascist efforts. Zeskind accepted STO’s position on the increasing autonomy of fascism, but argued strenuously that this independence was actually likely to increase the prominence of anti-Semitism within the fascist program. Thus, he maintained, “the Nazis’ anti-capitalism, like everything else, is a function of their racialism. In this case the racialism means anti-Semitism. My logical inference is that the Nazis’ revolutionary anti-capitalism stems from their anti-Semitism. Noel argues that the reverse is true, that the greater the anti-capitalism the less the anti-Semitism.”733 Ignatin responded that fascist autonomy from capital “eliminate[s] the need for a mythical ruling class to substitute for the real one as a target for their attacks.”734

From the outside, this may have appeared similar to many other amicable theoretical disputes in STO’s long history, but internally the stakes rapidly escalated. In part because of the devastating war in Lebanon, the debate quickly expanded to include not only the question of anti-Semitism but also the issue of the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine.735 STO had never taken an official stance on the question, but many members had long maintained the longstanding Leninist approach of advocating a single state, whether conceived of as “bi-national” or simply “secular.” Several members of the Kansas City branch challenged the necessity of this position, and forced a debate at the group’s National Committee meeting in September 1982, followed by a losing vote on the question of accepting a two-state solution. The meeting became quite heated, and Kansas City branch member Randy Gould accused the leadership of the group of adopting a “smash or be smashed” attitude. Certainly the animosity was not simply the result of a political disagreement, since it came as the culmination of several years of frustration on the part of the Kansas City branch regarding lines of communication and authority (as described in Chapter Seven). The final result was an acrimonious split, with Zeskind, Gould, and the remainder of the Kansas City branch leaving STO to form a short-lived antifascist collective.

* * *

In one of its final activities in the fall of 1982, the Kansas City branch produced a single issue of a magazine called Special Sedition, which was distributed largely within the white punk rock scene in that city. Designed in the style of a punk-rock fanzine with overlapping text and images cut and pasted on top of each other, the front cover features images of guns, knives, and other weapons. Prominent images inside depict police officers as targets for shooting practice, while the text includes lyrics from the Clash, reprints of photos and headlines from the mainstream media depicting protesters fighting police in Europe, and two long, unsigned original pieces. The first addresses the relationship between punk rock and youth rebellion, while the second is an impressionistic fictional take on a rebellious white teenager named “Filthy McNasty.” Both essays discuss violence against the police, with the first piece concluding, “Basically the idea is this: Go beyond a rebellious personal style, and make it really PUNK. Do the pogo stick on the racist KC cops, who are among the most bloodthirsty in the country. Take over the streets from the Plaza bozos, take what we need to survive and be happy, and when the cops try to stop us, burn down their stations, just like they do in England. Like the Clash says: LET’S GO CRAZY!!!!!”736 The endorsement of righteous violence against the police is perhaps the dominant theme of the entire magazine, although the embrace of autonomous youth rebellion in all its forms runs a close second.

Special Sedition was a departure for STO, and a controversial one inside the organization. Even though the group had long supported violence and even military action by oppressed groups such as the Puerto Rican clandestine movement, this was the first time that STO had openly published anything that could reasonably be described as a direct incitement to violence. The Northwest branch of STO, based in Portland and Seattle, strongly criticized the content of the magazine, denouncing it as “a call for random violence against the police and others.”737 They advanced two different arguments against the publication. First, they feared police harassment and repression of STO members as a result of the magazine’s public support for antipolice violence. Without rejecting illegality as such, they argued that “illegal activities demand clandestinity, and clandestinity has its own set of rules, and they are inflexible.”738 Second, they rejected the potentially antisocial attitude conveyed by Special Sedition. “We are aware,” they wrote, “that many of today’s working class but workless youth are seriously alienated from mainstream society.… Our task is to try to harness the alienated energy and turn it toward more useful channels of change.”739

Thus began a minor but instructive debate within STO over the concept of autonomy, this time in the context of youth, and especially white, working-class youth. Many members of STO responded negatively to both aspects of the argument made by the Northwest branch. Ken Lawrence focused his attention on the question of violence, and in particular on the question of whether Special Sedition amounted to “adventurism.” Drawing on the example of the broad public support for antipolice violence in Northern Ireland, he tied his answer to a speculative estimate of the future prospects of youth revolt and its ability to cross racial lines: “if we hope someday for white people to join the radical insurgent movements in the US with some recognized legitimacy, it is only likely to happen when oppressed people have some reason to view a sector of whites as revolutionary in the way they are, part of which would entail the use of similar forms of revolutionary struggle, both spontaneous and planned, increasingly organized, self-conscious and massive.”740 Lawrence also made it clear that he did not think it was problematic for STO to endorse illegal activity in which its own members would not engage, again using the Irish example of Sinn Fein’s public support for the IRA’s illegal activities.

Others in STO were less concerned with the question of violence than with the concept of youth autonomy. Ted Whitney, himself a younger member of STO, forcefully rejected the Northwest’s “harness the energy” approach, noting that “this phrase has terrible implications as an organizing principle if it is applied to youth, the working class, or a movement. It violates STO’s position on self-activity and autonomy. It unfortunately sounds so much like the left I have come to hate, a left that thinks of itself as the eventual leadership and conscience of the movement.”741 This concern was shared by many others in STO, which by this point was solidly attached to an expansive version of the idea of autonomy. While recognizing the possibility that white youth violence could manifest in antisocial and even fascist forms, Whitney and others maintained that “a left which is too conservative may end up losing potential comrades to the growing fascist movement.”742 In an antifascist context, then, the problem was not the danger of supporting youth rebellion, but rather the danger of not supporting it, of appearing to be too loyal to the status quo.

In some ways, the publication of Special Sedition marked the beginning of STO’s final phase of existence, one marked less by theoretical sophistication than by an intense commitment to militant direct action in a range of venues. As former member Bill Lamme comments, “this was not the period of dialectics workshops, this was post-dialectics and into diabolics.”743 He explains the transition as a sort of self-criticism of STO’s complicity in the impotence of radical movements:

We’re essentially playing the game by the rules that the ruling class wants, that is, that we don’t support the state, but our forms of protest are not threatening to the state. The movement presents no challenge to the state, only rhetorically, and its actions belie that. So, the last period for me was the period in which we attempted to do things, mass forms of illegal activity. You know, petty forms of property destruction, cut a lock or glue a lock, paint a wall at a demonstration, block the street, or interfere with what’s going on, and then not wait to get arrested, to run away and live to fight again, that sort of attitude. To just take a little feistier position in terms of our action and direct action. Direct action was not something new to STO, but the practicing of it had been limited.744

Even though he had been centrally involved in the preparations for the No Easy Answers Left conference, Lamme himself heartily embraced what appeared to some other veteran members of the group to be a 180 degree turn from what STO had previously represented. “I could certainly understand how somebody could say that that wasn’t STO because, as I said at the beginning, part of the thing that attracted me to STO was its intellectual rigor, and that period did not have that.… So, I think people left as the group changed … [but] to me, it was logical, the argument to do what we did at that point.”745

Of course, the group did not entirely abandon a commitment to theory, but its most distinctive theorizing during this period was concerned with revolutionary strategy. One major example was the strategy of refusal, borrowed from the writings of Antonio Negri, who by the early eighties was a political prisoner in Italy. Janeen Creamer and others in the group were especially interested in Negri’s 1977 essay “Working Class Sabotage and Capitalist Domination,” which they believed offered a workable approach to revolution. Creamer argued that “refusal is also an approach of confrontation—confrontation with all capitalist alternatives among sectors of the working class.”746 In STO’s hands, this strategy consolidated itself into the promotion of mass, public illegality as a way to break out of the constraints of reformism. Major direct actions against the US military, defense contractors, and other targets became the order of the day. This represented in some ways the practical implementation of the millenarian view of capitalism’s secular crisis described earlier, and it was part and parcel of the declining fortunes of STO. For every member who was enthusiastic for the strategy of refusal, there were others who left demoralized or confused at the left’s ever-worsening disarray.

* * *

By 1983, STO was in full organizational freefall. Having already lost the Kansas City branch, the group quickly shed its members in the Pacific Northwest, largely as a result of frustration at the handling of the Kansas City split, as well as disagreement with the majority sentiment in Chicago around Special Sedition and the limitations of the Harold Washington campaign. Others left as well, including longtime members like Noel Ignatin and Alan Rausch. Some newer members, recruited in the context of STO’s involvement with antinuclear and antiwar organizing, departed out of a growing skepticism of Leninism, a process that was unintentionally abetted by the group’s embrace of autonomy. (At least one person, former member Kingsley Clarke, rejoined the group during this period, but this was certainly the exception to the rule.) The shrinkage snowballed, and by September it was clear that only a handful of members outside of Chicago were still active in the organization. As a result, “it was decided to dissolve the NC [National Committee] and henceforth to have membership meetings.”747 Even though the group’s Discussion Bulletin for December of 1983 was one of the largest ever at 165 pages, replete with draft theses on topics like white supremacy and the Middle East, it was to be STO’s last gasp as far as publications were concerned. (Urgent Tasks had published its final issue a year before, in late 1982.)

While the sudden organizational silence may have given the impression of a group fading away, veterans of the final phase see it differently. Lamme, for instance, argues that

the left was also in the process of ending its run … by the mid-eighties, there were still groups out there, but it had lost a lot of its dynamic. There were still very committed people there, but not as many; the numbers had fallen. And I think partly, that impelled STO to go one way or the other. It was very hard to hold a middle ground in the politics that we represented. So in a way, we, those of us who were left at the end, were actually going out with a bang. We were saying, “If we’re going to do it, we’re going to give a little shock to the wing of the movement that we’re most a part of, in the form of this direct action, and see if we can light a spark. And part of the reason the movement is declining is because it’s never been serious enough, never really challenged the system in ways that people can identify with and do themselves, and so forth.748

Seen from this perspective, the turn toward direct action represented a final stab at resuscitating the dying remnants of the movements of the seventies that had always been STO’s milieu. As the final phase unfolded, STO existed in a form that contemporary radicals (especially anarchists) would immediately recognize as an affinity group: no more than a dozen members who, having developed a high degree of trust in each other through shared experience, worked together in the context of larger protests to push the envelope of business as usual.

In this final stage, STO’s biggest contribution was a series of actions outside the Rock Island Arsenal in 1984 and 1985. The Arsenal, located on an island in the Mississippi River between Illinois and Iowa some 170 miles west of Chicago, was the US military’s largest plant for the production of conventional weapons. In the mid-eighties, many of the machine guns and howitzer cannons manufactured on Rock Island were destined for US client states in El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel, Lebanon, and other imperialist hot spots. This made it a natural site of protest for those opposed to US military involvement in Central America and the Middle East. In fact, a small number of faith-based activists had held regular prayer services on the island, but outside the gates of the Arsenal itself, for several years. At the same time, STO had utilized its longstanding contacts within the anti-intervention movement, going back to the People’s Anti-War Mobilization in 1981, to participate in building a small activist core in Chicago known as the Disarm Now Action Group, sometimes shortened to Disarm Now. Early in 1984, Disarm Now worked to galvanize dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals in support of a militant protest outside the Arsenal that June. According to Janeen Porter and others, the first Rock Island protest was the result of a dream she had one night, in which a carefully orchestrated direct action shut down the Arsenal. Three bridges linked the island to the surrounding cities of Davenport, Moline, and Rock Island (collectively known, along with Bettendorf, as the Quad Cities), and the plan was to block traffic across the bridges.

The action was organized in a manner that carefully balanced the need to maximize media exposure with an attentiveness to secrecy in planning; spokespeople (including STO member Bill Lamme) routinely announced their objective was to shut down the plant, but they refused to specify the methods to be used. In yet another nod to the idea of autonomy, the participating groups were encouraged to devise their own action plans, produce their own leaflets and placards, and generally engage in what a later generation of activists came to know as “diversity of tactics.”749 In a subsequent evaluation of the day’s events, a member of Disarm Now pointed to the “contradiction in organizing” for the shutdown, between wanting to encourage militant creative tactics and needing a critical mass of participants for the action to be successful: “the invaluable aspect of this action that would have been lost in resolving the contradiction by compromise in either direction is the exposure of a large number of participants to autonomous direct action.”750

Outreach for the day of action was extensive. Both movement and mainstream media outlets across the country covered the impending showdown. Activist spokespeople like Lamme deliberately crafted their media comments as a moral appeal to the 9,000 civilian employees of the Arsenal. Contrasting the evident prosperity on the island with the shrinking farm equipment factories in the rapidly deindustrializing Quad Cities, Lamme said, “We’re not telling [Arsenal employees] to quit work. We’re not threatening them. We just want them to think about the end result of their work and realize they aren’t just some cog in a wheel.… There is job stability for weapons makers while people who make implements for food production are out of work.”751 Even in its final phase, STO incorporated an appeal to working-class autonomy into its activities.

Direct appeals for support and participation were also made to working-class people in the Quad Cities. According to one report, “several distinct leaflets were written, one called ‘Hungry? Eat your 105MM Howitzer’ for unemployed workers and workers in the agricultural implements plants in the Quad Cities.”752 Kingsley Clarke distinctly remembers distributing this leaflet to people waiting in lines at welfare offices in Davenport.753 Another key target audience was disaffected and especially punk-rock-oriented young people. When the Clash toured the US that spring, they played in Davenport and encouraged their fans to attend “a party on June 4th to push all the tanks into the river.”754 Concert-goers there and at other Midwestern punk shows that spring received a leaflet that described the planned demonstration and joked about “the Disruption, a new street dance.”755

The US Military responded to the impending protest by dramatically enhancing security procedures. New chainlink fencing and concertina wire were installed on the island, and guard posts were built on all approaching bridges. A new commander was appointed, and one of his first actions was to prohibit the long-standing prayer vigils and seal off previously open parts of the military base.756 In a telling sign of military anxiety, three hundred specially trained military police were redeployed from Georgia and Kansas to reinforce the Arsenal’s ranks. Local police forces in each of the surrounding cities spent heavily on riot gear and other new equipment as the siege-like atmosphere filtered out from the island. Quad Cities activists claimed they were under police surveillance as the day of the protest approached.

Finally, in the early morning of Monday, June 4, several hundred protesters converged on the Quad Cities. Because of the autonomous affinity group design of the demonstration, there was a wide range of protest activity, all of it militant while remaining nonviolent. People used street repair barricades and detour signs to divert traffic as it approached the bridges. Others performed educational skits for workers and others stuck in traffic. Kingsley Clarke recalls that “there were five hundred or so people in Rock Island, ranging from people who wanted to do what I call pranks, like dressing up in clown uniforms, people who chained themselves to various stable objects, people who just ran wild in the streets, and of course STO took pride in its slightly more militaristic, planned approach.”757 In the end, close to two hundred protestors were arrested over several hours, but the bridges and the Arsenal remained open. Organizers from Disarm Now nonetheless claimed victory for having severely disrupted the normal operations of the plant.

Inside STO and Disarm Now, discussions began almost immediately about staging a second attempt. A small protest with no arrests took place that September, but Rock Island “Two” did not take place until October 21, 1985. This time, the organizers actively encouraged a more militant approach to shutting down the Arsenal. While still welcoming traditional civil disobedience, one leaflet designed to recruit participants allowed people to check a box labeled “I want to mess up the Arsenal, get away, and do it again.”758 This approach led to the withdrawal of several groups that had participated in the first action, and the total number of participants was perhaps three hundred instead of the five to six hundred that showed the prior year. Clarke remembers that the second attempt was “a smaller effort in every way, and an attempt to be more precise.”759 Local police put their own spin on the difference, with a Rock Island Police Sergeant claiming that “this year, they were more hostile and violent.”760 Activists used railroad ties, car tires, and other objects to stop traffic approaching the bridges. Others pushed junked automobiles into the roadways and then chained themselves inside. Some demonstrators clashed directly with police, and several injuries were reported. Once again, the bridges and the Arsenal remained open for business, but this time protesters claimed “we at least slowed Arsenal production momentarily.”761 The official response denied this, claiming that “98 percent” of employees arrived on time to work.762 While the outcome was still far short of the stated goal of shutting down access to the island, many participants believed it was more effective than the first attempt. Nonetheless, in the aftermath the organizing groups splintered further over the question of proper tactics. In a context where neither attempt had achieved its stated objective of shutting down the plant, and where Reagan’s warmongering seemed more popular than ever, demoralization began to set in. After 1985, no further attempts were made to shut down the Arsenal.

The two Rock Island demonstrations were part of a series of militant direct actions in which STO was actively involved during the mid-eighties. Others targeted the major defense contractor Northrop, the Great Lakes Naval Base in the north suburbs of Chicago, as well as companies that were using strike-breaking scab labor, including Greyhound Bus Company. Each of these protests arguably enhanced the skills and experience of a number of activists and raised public awareness on a range of causes, but they did not force immediate, substantial changes on the part of the targeted entities. Without concrete victories, it was difficult to sustain the energy required to plan and execute actions that included a substantial risk of arrest. Nonetheless, the direct-action wing of the anti-intervention movement remained strong in the Midwest throughout the decade, and many of the veterans of the Rock Island demonstrations were involved for years to come.

* * *

In the end, STO’s bang really did become a whimper, however. Participation in direct-action protests continued, but eventually the organizational framework simply stopped functioning. No former member can pinpoint precisely when in the mid-eighties the Sojourner Truth Organization ceased to exist. The remaining members were getting older, so the physical exertion and risk aspects of the direct-action model were relatively more demanding. Meanwhile, dozens if not hundreds of former members had moved on in their lives, some still working in factories or offices, others returning to school or to professional careers they had earlier abandoned in favor of revolutionary struggle. Almost without exception, they remained politically on the left, although a great number made their personal peace with the persistence of capitalism and ceased to identify as revolutionaries. STO was hardly alone in its terminal decline: it was preceded in death by the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), the May 19th Communist Organization, the Philadelphia Workers’ Organizing Committee, and literally dozens of other sometime competitors on the far left. And while the various broader social movements continued to ebb and flow, the revolutionary aspects of many of them were increasingly eclipsed by the pull of reform and social democracy. The mid-eighties was a very difficult time to survive politically on the outer fringes of the US left.

At a certain point, possibly in 1986, someone still in the group received a notice from the US Postal Service that they needed to pay their annual bill for maintaining STO’s mailing address. For at least fifteen years, the Sojourner Truth Organization had been associated in its printed material with P.O. Box 8493, Chicago IL 60680. But when the publishing side of things stopped, the remaining members apparently forgot about the P.O. Box. As Bill Lamme remembers it, laughing while he tells the story, “And at one point, I forget how I got it, but all of a sudden I got the responsibility to go check the mailbox. The mailbox hadn’t been checked in something like a year.… I went and picked up the junk, and I think I renewed the thing for another year, but I don’t think I ever went back and checked it.”763 So ended the Sojourner Truth Organization, more than a decade and a half after it sprang to life at the end of 1969.

656 For more on the first Mayor Daley, see Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley—His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (New York: Back Bay, 2001).

657 Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 235–241 and 500–522, describes the racial aspects of the Chicago machine as well as King’s attempts to organize in the North.

658 This connection is made directly in Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 275–281.

659 One factor here may have been that while the Puerto Rican Socialist Party was in serious decline at that point, the remnants of the Party in Chicago were actively supporting Washington’s candidacy. Jose Lopez, interview with the author, October 18, 2008.

660 The leaflet is reproduced in IDB #31, April 1983, 61. All quotes in this paragraph come from the leaflet.

661 For more on Fannie Lou Hamer, see Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

662 Steve Whitman, “Dear Zulma” letter CC’d to STO and reprinted in IDB #31, 77.

663 Ira Churgin, “STO and Washington,” in IDB #31, 63.

664 Ibid., 63.

665 Zulma Ortiz Berria, letter to Bill Lamme, in IDB #31, 62.

666 Bill Lamme, “On the Washington Leaflet,” in IDB #31, 66.

667 Ibid.

668 Churgin, “STO and Washington,” 63.

669 “STO National Committee Minutes, February 13, 1983—Harold Washington Campaign,” in IDB #31, 41–42.

670 Churgin, “STO and Washington,” 63.

671 The leave of absence is noted in the letter from Marilyn Katz to “Dear National Council Members,” in IDB #31, 59. Her subsequent departure from the organization was described by Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.

672 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.

673 “Thinking of Voting for Epton?” leaflet, in IDB #31, 73.

674 Ibid.

675 “Adopted Stance,” in IDB #31, 72.

676 A decade earlier, STO had published as a pamphlet a speech given by Richard Hatcher, the black mayor of Gary, Indiana. In 1983, Hatcher was still mayor, and Gary was not the hotbed of revolution STO had hoped it would become. It is possible that the bitterness of this experience influenced the group’s negative response to Washington. Richard Hatcher, “…And We Shall Take With Us the Best…,” (Chicago: STO, c. 1972), pamphlet in author’s possession.

677 For more on Miami, see Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn, The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1984); on Brixton, see We Want to Riot Not to Work: The 1981 Brixton Uprisings (London: Riot Not to Work Collective, 1982); for continental Europe’s autonomist movement, see George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997).

678 Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” in The Prison Notebooks, 333.

679 TARP, 26.

680 Ibid.

681 Ibid., 26–27.

682 The same aspect is also implicit later in the pamphlet in the criticism of “communist leadership” of the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937. Ibid., 35.

683 Noel Ignatin, “Black Worker, White Worker” (1972), reprinted in Workplace Papers, 1980, 25.

684 Alan Rausch, “In Partial Payment: Class Struggle, Sexuality, and the Gay Movement,” in UT #7, Winter 1980, 11. This essay was subsequently republished as a pamphlet in 1981, with an introductory note that indicates it was originally written in 1978. “Queer,” “transgender,” and other more contemporary terms do not appear in Rausch’s piece (other than in a negative reference to “queer-baiting”), and are thus avoided here as well.

685 Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 30.

686 Schapiro tallies the vote as 41 to 5, with 5 abstentions. Ibid., 50.

687 Don Hamerquist, White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question, 23. Schapiro notes that while Lenin and Stalin both voted for the Bund’s re-admission, “many other Bolsheviks voted against it.” Schapiro, The Community Party, 74.

688 Potere Operaio Veneto-Emiliano, “La lotta dei Vietcong ci insegna che la rivoluzione e possible,” in Potere Operaio #1, 1967. Quoted in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 132.

689 Steve Wright, Storming Heaven, 131.

690 The website http://bigflameuk.wordpress.com/ (accessed January 10, 2012) provides an impressive collection of original documents and contemporary reflections on Big Flame.

691 The Red Notes Collective in England began to produce translations as early as 1976, but it is not clear when and to what extent these were available in the United States.

692 Noel Ignatin, “Who ‘We’ Is” (nd, but c. 1980), unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. Thanks to Steve Wright for providing me a copy of this document, which was initially distributed among the members of Big Flame.

693 Katsiaficas, Subversion of Politics, 6. A very different radical vision of autonomy is presented by the philosopher Sarah Lucia Hoagland, who shares with Katsiaficas and others a critique of Kantian individualism, but attempts to resolve the contradiction between the individual and social aspects of autonomy by coining the term “autokoenony,” from the Greek words for “self” and “community.” In her terms, “an autokoenonous being is one who is aware of her self as one among others within a community that forms her ground of be-ing, one who makes her decisions in consideration of her limitations as well as in consideration of the agendas and perceptions of others. She does not merge with others, nor does she estrange herself; she interacts with others in situations.” Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value (Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988), 145.

694 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by David McLellan, quoted in McLellan, ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 345.

695 Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 705–706. (This translation differs from McLellan, and was the preferred version in use by STO in the early eighties.)

696 Hamerquist’s unpublished essay simply titled “Rewrite #3” from 1983, quotes the relevant passage from the Grundrisse and discusses the bleak possibilities that presented themselves in the absence of a revitalized anti-capitalist left. In author’s possession. This is the speech that Hamerquist was to have given as a keynote at the No Easy Answers Left conference in New York City.

697 Marx, Grundrisse (Nicolaus translation), 706. A similarly optimistic take on the shift toward technology can be found in the sixties writings of the anarchist Murray Bookchin, especially his 1968 essay “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986 [1971]),55–76.

698 Ibid.

699 Steve Wright, Storming Heaven, 173.

700 Antonio Negri, “Capitalist Domination and Working Class Sabotage” (1977), as quoted in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven, 173. Wright maintains that this pamphlet “went on to become a best seller.” At the very least, it was popular within STO during the early eighties, with Janeen Creamer in particular utilizing it on several occasions in polemics within the organization.

701 Lee Holstein, “Working Class Self-Activity: A Response to Kim Moody,” in UT #9, Summer 1980, 13.

702 Ibid., 12.

703 Ibid.

704 Ibid., 18–19.

705 Ibid., 17.

706 Geoff Bailey, “1960s Radicals Turn to Party Building,” in International Socialist Review #53 (May/June, 2007) describes the role played by the IS in the development of TDU.

707 Janeen Creamer, “Proposal for a Citywide Workers’ Group,” in IDB #19, October 1980, 28.

708 Carole Travis, “Some Thoughts on Proletarian Organization,” in IDB #23A, June 1981, 13.

709 Ibid., 14.

710 Lowell May, “Class Organizing Comments,” in Secret Supplement to IDB #24, September 1981, 35.

711 For more on Halk, see Chapter Three.

712 Noel Ignatin, “For Autonomism,” in IDB #30, February, 1983, 3.

713 For more on Greensboro, see Elizabeth Wheaton, Codename Greenkil: The 1979 Greensboro Killings (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009 [1987]) as well as the analytical memoir written by a survivor of the massacre, Signe Waller, Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir: People’s History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002).

714 Noel Ignatin presented multiple examples of this phenomenon within the seventies left in “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” in UT #4, Summer 1978.

715 Don Hamerquist, “Fascism in the U.S.?” (Chicago: STO, 1976 [1974]), 2.

716 Ibid., 5.

717 Ibid., 6.

718 Ibid.

719 Ibid.

720 Quoted in Ignatin, “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” in UT #4, Summer 1978, 27.

721 Ibid., 29.

722 Ken Lawrence, “Fighting the New Ku Klux Klan/Nazi Threat,” in IDB Special Issue, April 1981, 11–14.

723 Ibid., 1–2. Lawrence explicitly acknowledges the importance of Ignatin’s 1978 piece in this regard.

724 Ibid., 6.

725 Randy Gould, “Smash the Klan,” in Secret Supplement to IDB #24, September 1981, 55.

726 Ibid., 55–56.

727 Lawrence, “Fighting,” 17.

728 “Theses on Fascism,” in UT #12. Available online at http://sojournertruth.net/thesesonfascism.html (accessed January 10, 2012).

729 Noel Ignatin, “Comment on the Theses,” in UT #12. Available online at http://sojournertruth.net/thesesonfascism.html (accessed January 10, 2012).

730 “Theses on Fascism,” in UT #12.

731 Ibid.

732 Ignatin, “Comment.”

733 Lenny Zeskind, letter to UT, in UT#13, Fall/Winter 1982, 36.

734 “Ignatin replies,” in UT#13, 37.

735 This narrative is synthesized from several letters in IDB #30, February, 1983, and #31, April 1983, as well as interviews with Randy Gould, Ira and Lee Churgin, and others.

736 Special Sedition, November 1982, 5. In author’s possession.

737 Letter from Frank Giese “for the NW branch” November 16, 1982, in Secret Supplement to IDB #29, December 1982, 1.

738 Ibid.

739 Ibid.

740 Ken Lawrence, “Questions for the NC Debate on Special Sedition,” in IDB #31, 9. In defining “adventurist,” Lawrence utilized the term “Custeristic,” coined in 1969 by Fred Hampton, then Chair of the Illinois Black Panther Party, to criticize the Days of Rage coordinated that fall by the Weatherman faction of SDS.

741 Ted Whitney, “Dear Comrades of the NW Branch,” letter in IDB #31, 31.

742 Ibid.

743 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.

744 Ibid.

745 Ibid.

746 Janeen Porter, “On Negri,” in Discussion Bulletin, December 1983, 132.

747 “Organization/Membership,” in Discussion Bulletin, December 1983, 109.

748 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.

749 For a sympathetic analysis of the emergence of “diversity of tactics” in the context of the movement against capitalist globalization from the Seattle protests of 1999 to the Québec City demonstrations of 2011, see Chris Hurl, “Anti-Globalization and ‘Diversity of Tactics’,” in Upping the Anti- Number 1 (2005). Available online at http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/01-anti-globalization-and-diversity-of-tactics/ (accessed January 10, 2012).

750 Mike Haywood, “The Siege of the Arsenal: Project Disarm’s Direct Action at the Army’s Rock Island,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession (n.d., but c. 1984, 3).

751 Quoted in “Arsenal protest aims for 1-day shutdown,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1984, N4.

752 Haywood, “The Siege of the Arsenal,” 5.

753 Kingsley Clarke, interview with the author, April 2, 2006.

754 Quoted in Haywood, “The Siege of the Arsenal,” 5.

755 Ibid.

756 See “Arsenal protest aims for 1-day shutdown,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1984, N4.

757 Kingsley Clarke, interview with the author, April 2, 2006.

758 Disarm Now Action Group leaflet in author’s possession, n.d., but c. 1985.

759 Clarke, interview with the author, April 2, 2006.

760 Quoted in “85 Seized in Demonstration at Arsenal,” Chicago Tribune, Tuesday October 22, 1985, 3A.

761 Quoted in “117 Arrested in Arsenal Clash,” Moline Daily Dispatch, Monday October 21, 1985, 1A.

762 Ibid.

763 Bill Lamme, interview with the author, July 20, 2005.