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Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986
Founded in Chicago in 1969 from the rubble of the recently crumbled SDS, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) brought working-class consciousness to the forefront of New Left discourse, sending radicals back into the factories and thinking through the integration of radical politics into everyday realities. Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies. Michael Staudenmaier is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois-Urbana.
387 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 4, 2019
i started reading this a few years ago and stopped after a couple chapters, once the book moved past sto's workplace organizing days into its anti-imperialist solidarity period. re reading it i still skimmed most of the chapters where the organizations activity involved printing leaflets and attending protests, but i managed to finish it this time.
no 70s left group succeeded in their aims or laid down much of a stable base for future generations of radicals- sto included. what separates sto from the pack and makes this book useful reading (for a few chapters anyway) are a few things:
- the fact that they organized in the workplace but didn't just try to take over unions
- that they organized among white workers but made fighting white supremacy in the workplace a priority, regardless of how much it may have isolated them sometimes
- that they emphasized internal political education and philosophical training, to try and overcome the informal hierarchy of those who have read theory vs those who havent
- their unorthodox leninism that saved them from a self-destructive party-building period of the type that ruined a lot of other new communist movement groups.
groups trying to organize at work and grappling with the thorough shittiness of american unions and american workplaces generally, or groups trying to form a lasting, durable revolutionary organization with a healthy internal culture could learn something from the way sto dealt with all of these issues. a good place to start learning about the group is the sto's online archive, specifically the 'workplace papers' https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/...
no 70s left group succeeded in their aims or laid down much of a stable base for future generations of radicals- sto included. what separates sto from the pack and makes this book useful reading (for a few chapters anyway) are a few things:
- the fact that they organized in the workplace but didn't just try to take over unions
- that they organized among white workers but made fighting white supremacy in the workplace a priority, regardless of how much it may have isolated them sometimes
- that they emphasized internal political education and philosophical training, to try and overcome the informal hierarchy of those who have read theory vs those who havent
- their unorthodox leninism that saved them from a self-destructive party-building period of the type that ruined a lot of other new communist movement groups.
groups trying to organize at work and grappling with the thorough shittiness of american unions and american workplaces generally, or groups trying to form a lasting, durable revolutionary organization with a healthy internal culture could learn something from the way sto dealt with all of these issues. a good place to start learning about the group is the sto's online archive, specifically the 'workplace papers' https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/...
April 20, 2022
An extremely good read that serves as both a history of a political organisation and the social, political and movement history of a fertile historical period.
Any book that begins with a quote from a Bruce Springsteen song to introduce the second part of the book has got something going for it.
Any book that begins with a quote from a Bruce Springsteen song to introduce the second part of the book has got something going for it.
January 13, 2013
this was one of the best movement/org histories i have read. it was thorough and well written and was not just a recount of events or even the groups theoretical contributions but also a political assessment of both their work and their legacy. sto was a peculiar organization in a lot of ways. further, there are tons of lessons in here for modern revolutionaries on a lot of pertinent issues. i highly recommend this book.
March 6, 2013
Review posted on Toward Freedom.
* * *
Revolutionary organizations are not “structures”, nor “categories”, but rather “something, which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.” While E.P. Thompson is describing class here in the preface of his potent and enduring Making of the English Working Class, we can assert that it is the micropolitical affects and flows that in turn construct revolutionary organizations. And so the task of Michael Staudenmaier in the book Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 is to show these human relationships and how they happened.
The Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) throughout its seventeen-year existence sought to address in a practical and engaged manner the various crises and challenges of a revolutionary organization in the post-1968 years. For a small cadre organization it worked on a dizzying array of initiatives, including workplace organizing, international solidarity, reproductive rights, the movement against police brutality, and the antiwar movement. While the party-building and vanguard models utilized by the STO have been discredited with the passage of time, many of the questions it grappled with – most notably, “the attachment of white workers to the privileges of white skin” – are contemporary ones.
Herein Staudenmaier produces an absorbing work of history in a work which is readable and properly periodized within STO’s stages of development. But periodization is not necessarily contextualization, and the book would have been improved by further engagement with neighboring organizations as well as the political environs and debates of the day. Furthermore, Staudenmaier’s conclusion, to read the STO politically, missed the opportunity to directly confront the misunderstandings prevalent in current movements around white privilege and class struggle.
Staudenmaier’s book, recently-released AK Press, is one amongst many that document white revolutionary organizations of the 1970s and 1980s. A number of the others that have appeared in the past few years include: Outlaws of American (2005), Revolution in the Air (2006), The Hidden 1970s (2010), Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power (2011), and Oppose and Propose (2011). These are part of larger trend documenting the 1960s through to the 1980s as numerous titles on organizing by Black, Puerto Rican, and Native American revolutionaries have appeared; including biographies of their core and peripheral members.
Workplace Papers
As the antiwar movement fragmented following the dissolution of Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, STO was one of the many formulations that turned to organizing in working class neighborhoods and factories. The members cobbled together a unique array of influences – including Leninist and Gramscian Marxism, the Industrial Workers of the Work, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, various Revolutionary Union Movements and Black Nationalist currents, as well as the European worker-student uprisings of a few years earlier. Largely a Chicago-based organization through this period and throughout most of its existence, they envisioned themselves as part of the “Petrograd-Detroit proletariat” and had a direct line to a previous generation of militants in Detroit through Ken Lawrence, who was part of Facing Reality with CLR James and Marty Glaberman.
Utilizing workplace committee models, broadsheets and workplace newsletters, and a commitment to ultra-left politics, they sought to organize white industrial workers to challenge their position within the racial hierarchy. STO argued that the business unions were in collusion with capital and refused to challenge the white privilege of their members. By white privilege they meant that those with white skin gain privileges of power, wealth, and station by the simple fact that they are white. In turn STO created a workers council structure proposed by Gramsci, James, and others. Expecting a major upsurge in militant activity, STO planned for a workers rebellion that didn’t in fact take place. Furthermore, they were surprised by the conditions and perspectives of the white working class, as Noel Ignatin (later Ignatiev of How the Irish Became White and Race Traitor) stated in the preface to their 1980 collection Workplace Papers:
We found that, while we were able, for pedagogical purposes, to clearly distinguish between the autonomous and subordinated aspects of workers' behavior, in practice the distinction wasn't so clear. We found direct action mixed up with inner-union maneuvering, sabotage along side of legalistic activities, etc. — and we found that the workers we encountered were unwilling to make a categorical separation between one course of action and the other.
Time and again we encountered workers, with whom we had cooperated in shop-floor battles and who understood that no fundamental change could come through union reform, being drawn into unproductive inner-union squabbling — usually starting with the notion that it was purely tactical but, after a time, being wholly absorbed by it.
STO, in Ignatin’s words, fumbled to find a clear point of intervention. Herein the workers themselves were unencumbered by the strangleholds of revolutionary theory and hence were able to read the possibilities for struggle, but are equally “drawn into unproductive” activities. It is the dyad between revolutionary theory and self-activity that will haunt the organization, and many others, and finds its clearest expression in autonomy and autonomist Marxism in the years that follow. STO sought to confront the actually existing complexities of working lives and in turn develop strategies that practically addressed these complexities; hence Staudenmaier attests, and I would agree, that they are worth reexamining for our present moment.
Rather than adopting a utopian or ideological position, as many of their contemporaries did, they attempted to meet the white working class where it stood, slept, and drank. In the process STO removed itself from direct contact with much of the left, which was then stumbling with the collapse of the antiwar movement, and moved increasingly toward a “commitment to the autonomy of workers in struggle,” as Staudenmaier puts it.
STO entered factory organizing during the century’s peak of labor unrest with active wildcat strikes tearing apart the Taylorist work discipline. Herein a party-building project within the industrial sphere seemed not only likely but necessary to further the revolutionary potential of the working class. But STO and their contemporary party builders were wrong. Following a heated debate STO turned toward creating autonomous workplace organizations outside of the unions.
It is through this dedication to autonomous working class struggle and publications such as Workplace Papers – typifying the workerism of the 1970s and 80s – that many contemporary radicals discovered STO. Undertones of this work can be found in the workplace newsletters of European precarity movements and point of production organizing of the Starbucks Workers Union. But it was the question of white privilege, which the STO turned to in the context of their campaigns, that found its way into the present – though this popular discourse on the left is oft without reference to the STO’s legacy.
White Privilege
Drawing on W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America and neighboring work, STO sought to overcome the errors of white activists in the civil rights movement and the missteps made by white, middle-class activists during the movement against the Vietnam War. While these particular debates within STO are beyond the scope of this review, Staudenmaier illustrates the complexities of these discussions as the organization sought to address the “public and psychological wage” white workers gain over black workers. Furthermore, Ignatiev and others spoke of the “white blind spot” that prevented white workers from seeing their common struggle with black workers.
Another STO pamphlet of the time, Don Hamerquist’s “White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question,” is worth reading in its entirety. Herein STO outlines its strategy of centralizing the struggle against white supremacy as Hamerquist pronounces “[t]he specific shape and content of white privileges are determined through class struggle. The ruling class attempts to shape both reform concessions and the direction of repression in ways which maximize the strategic divisions within the working class. Thus while white supremacy does not eliminate the class struggle, it limits, confines, and channels it into forms that make a conception of group interest based on skin color appear to over-ride class interest for the masses of people.” Further, from Truth and Revolution, “Ignatin argued powerfully that white supremacy was the main roadblock to working-class unity in the US. And since unity of the working class was an essential precondition to any revolutionary upsurge, the repudiation of white skin privileges by white workers was a necessary first step on the road to revolution.”
Unlike many current formulations, and illustrated above, STO saw the struggle against white supremacy (now reduced to ‘privilege’) a practical rather than a moral one. Partially derived from colleague Ted Allen, STO identified white supremacy as developing concurrent with capitalism in the US. Hence it has a material-basis in class divisions and relations of production rather than simply being a question of individual bias, representation, or legal exclusion. Taking their factory organizing into account, STO viewed the struggle against white supremacy as the necessary first step toward class unity and subsequent class struggle in the US. But what does this mean for our contemporary organizing now decades following deindustrialization with precarious and decentralized workplaces? And what does the struggle against white supremacy become when it is addressed in workshops held in infoshops and amongst friendship networks?
Addressing white privilege on individual terms, outside of organizing campaigns – as well as the reduction of race, class, gender, and class to a checklist – is an unfortunate part of our contemporary movement culture. White privilege and intersectionality of oppression, the latter derived from women of color feminism, have degraded into balance sheets (vague notions such as checking privilege) and hierarchies of who is the most oppressed (and hence the most revolutionary) rather than an expression of a complex set of social relations. STO member Jasper Collins, in the Preface to the 1978 edition of the aforementioned Hamerquist pamphlet, argues “there is no direct correspondence between degree of oppression and revolutionary potential.” Furthermore, STO clearly understood that oppressive social relations in a capitalist society are material, class-based ones and that the struggle against them must address the ‘distribution of life chances,’ to use a current phrase.
Urgent Tasks
Staudenmaier states, “[f]or an organization with a highly developed theoretical position on white supremacy and white skin privilege, it is perhaps surprising that STO was never able to formally resolve the practical question of whether it was multiracial or all-white.” Herein he illustrates the often-striking gulf that exists in revolutionary organizations between the richness of their ideas and their inability to put these into practice organizationally. Important for the diligent reader, Staudenmaier tells the story of STO’s interpersonal allegiances and factions. Herein we are provided a glimpse into the various complexities and struggles that take place within a revolutionary organization. Furthermore, by introducing the debates contained within various STO publications – which are available online at the STO digital archive (http://www.sojournertruth.net/) – the theoretical synthesis of such thinkers as Marx, DuBois, Lenin, Gramsci, James, and others are shown to confront the realities of the anti-war, workplace organizing, feminist, queer, anti-fascist, and anti-nuke movements. Those seeking a route out of the stasis of our post-counter-globalization and post-Occupy moment should turn, in part, to the reflections contained within Truth and Revolution lest we continue to repeat the debates and arguments of a previous cycle of struggle.
Reading the STO politically is Staudenmaier’s task. Our urgent task is reading the history of the STO, and parallel people’s histories, as we consider the current predicaments of our own revolutionary organizations.
* * *
Revolutionary organizations are not “structures”, nor “categories”, but rather “something, which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.” While E.P. Thompson is describing class here in the preface of his potent and enduring Making of the English Working Class, we can assert that it is the micropolitical affects and flows that in turn construct revolutionary organizations. And so the task of Michael Staudenmaier in the book Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 is to show these human relationships and how they happened.
The Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) throughout its seventeen-year existence sought to address in a practical and engaged manner the various crises and challenges of a revolutionary organization in the post-1968 years. For a small cadre organization it worked on a dizzying array of initiatives, including workplace organizing, international solidarity, reproductive rights, the movement against police brutality, and the antiwar movement. While the party-building and vanguard models utilized by the STO have been discredited with the passage of time, many of the questions it grappled with – most notably, “the attachment of white workers to the privileges of white skin” – are contemporary ones.
Herein Staudenmaier produces an absorbing work of history in a work which is readable and properly periodized within STO’s stages of development. But periodization is not necessarily contextualization, and the book would have been improved by further engagement with neighboring organizations as well as the political environs and debates of the day. Furthermore, Staudenmaier’s conclusion, to read the STO politically, missed the opportunity to directly confront the misunderstandings prevalent in current movements around white privilege and class struggle.
Staudenmaier’s book, recently-released AK Press, is one amongst many that document white revolutionary organizations of the 1970s and 1980s. A number of the others that have appeared in the past few years include: Outlaws of American (2005), Revolution in the Air (2006), The Hidden 1970s (2010), Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power (2011), and Oppose and Propose (2011). These are part of larger trend documenting the 1960s through to the 1980s as numerous titles on organizing by Black, Puerto Rican, and Native American revolutionaries have appeared; including biographies of their core and peripheral members.
Workplace Papers
As the antiwar movement fragmented following the dissolution of Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, STO was one of the many formulations that turned to organizing in working class neighborhoods and factories. The members cobbled together a unique array of influences – including Leninist and Gramscian Marxism, the Industrial Workers of the Work, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, various Revolutionary Union Movements and Black Nationalist currents, as well as the European worker-student uprisings of a few years earlier. Largely a Chicago-based organization through this period and throughout most of its existence, they envisioned themselves as part of the “Petrograd-Detroit proletariat” and had a direct line to a previous generation of militants in Detroit through Ken Lawrence, who was part of Facing Reality with CLR James and Marty Glaberman.
Utilizing workplace committee models, broadsheets and workplace newsletters, and a commitment to ultra-left politics, they sought to organize white industrial workers to challenge their position within the racial hierarchy. STO argued that the business unions were in collusion with capital and refused to challenge the white privilege of their members. By white privilege they meant that those with white skin gain privileges of power, wealth, and station by the simple fact that they are white. In turn STO created a workers council structure proposed by Gramsci, James, and others. Expecting a major upsurge in militant activity, STO planned for a workers rebellion that didn’t in fact take place. Furthermore, they were surprised by the conditions and perspectives of the white working class, as Noel Ignatin (later Ignatiev of How the Irish Became White and Race Traitor) stated in the preface to their 1980 collection Workplace Papers:
We found that, while we were able, for pedagogical purposes, to clearly distinguish between the autonomous and subordinated aspects of workers' behavior, in practice the distinction wasn't so clear. We found direct action mixed up with inner-union maneuvering, sabotage along side of legalistic activities, etc. — and we found that the workers we encountered were unwilling to make a categorical separation between one course of action and the other.
Time and again we encountered workers, with whom we had cooperated in shop-floor battles and who understood that no fundamental change could come through union reform, being drawn into unproductive inner-union squabbling — usually starting with the notion that it was purely tactical but, after a time, being wholly absorbed by it.
STO, in Ignatin’s words, fumbled to find a clear point of intervention. Herein the workers themselves were unencumbered by the strangleholds of revolutionary theory and hence were able to read the possibilities for struggle, but are equally “drawn into unproductive” activities. It is the dyad between revolutionary theory and self-activity that will haunt the organization, and many others, and finds its clearest expression in autonomy and autonomist Marxism in the years that follow. STO sought to confront the actually existing complexities of working lives and in turn develop strategies that practically addressed these complexities; hence Staudenmaier attests, and I would agree, that they are worth reexamining for our present moment.
Rather than adopting a utopian or ideological position, as many of their contemporaries did, they attempted to meet the white working class where it stood, slept, and drank. In the process STO removed itself from direct contact with much of the left, which was then stumbling with the collapse of the antiwar movement, and moved increasingly toward a “commitment to the autonomy of workers in struggle,” as Staudenmaier puts it.
STO entered factory organizing during the century’s peak of labor unrest with active wildcat strikes tearing apart the Taylorist work discipline. Herein a party-building project within the industrial sphere seemed not only likely but necessary to further the revolutionary potential of the working class. But STO and their contemporary party builders were wrong. Following a heated debate STO turned toward creating autonomous workplace organizations outside of the unions.
It is through this dedication to autonomous working class struggle and publications such as Workplace Papers – typifying the workerism of the 1970s and 80s – that many contemporary radicals discovered STO. Undertones of this work can be found in the workplace newsletters of European precarity movements and point of production organizing of the Starbucks Workers Union. But it was the question of white privilege, which the STO turned to in the context of their campaigns, that found its way into the present – though this popular discourse on the left is oft without reference to the STO’s legacy.
White Privilege
Drawing on W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America and neighboring work, STO sought to overcome the errors of white activists in the civil rights movement and the missteps made by white, middle-class activists during the movement against the Vietnam War. While these particular debates within STO are beyond the scope of this review, Staudenmaier illustrates the complexities of these discussions as the organization sought to address the “public and psychological wage” white workers gain over black workers. Furthermore, Ignatiev and others spoke of the “white blind spot” that prevented white workers from seeing their common struggle with black workers.
Another STO pamphlet of the time, Don Hamerquist’s “White Supremacy and the Afro-American National Question,” is worth reading in its entirety. Herein STO outlines its strategy of centralizing the struggle against white supremacy as Hamerquist pronounces “[t]he specific shape and content of white privileges are determined through class struggle. The ruling class attempts to shape both reform concessions and the direction of repression in ways which maximize the strategic divisions within the working class. Thus while white supremacy does not eliminate the class struggle, it limits, confines, and channels it into forms that make a conception of group interest based on skin color appear to over-ride class interest for the masses of people.” Further, from Truth and Revolution, “Ignatin argued powerfully that white supremacy was the main roadblock to working-class unity in the US. And since unity of the working class was an essential precondition to any revolutionary upsurge, the repudiation of white skin privileges by white workers was a necessary first step on the road to revolution.”
Unlike many current formulations, and illustrated above, STO saw the struggle against white supremacy (now reduced to ‘privilege’) a practical rather than a moral one. Partially derived from colleague Ted Allen, STO identified white supremacy as developing concurrent with capitalism in the US. Hence it has a material-basis in class divisions and relations of production rather than simply being a question of individual bias, representation, or legal exclusion. Taking their factory organizing into account, STO viewed the struggle against white supremacy as the necessary first step toward class unity and subsequent class struggle in the US. But what does this mean for our contemporary organizing now decades following deindustrialization with precarious and decentralized workplaces? And what does the struggle against white supremacy become when it is addressed in workshops held in infoshops and amongst friendship networks?
Addressing white privilege on individual terms, outside of organizing campaigns – as well as the reduction of race, class, gender, and class to a checklist – is an unfortunate part of our contemporary movement culture. White privilege and intersectionality of oppression, the latter derived from women of color feminism, have degraded into balance sheets (vague notions such as checking privilege) and hierarchies of who is the most oppressed (and hence the most revolutionary) rather than an expression of a complex set of social relations. STO member Jasper Collins, in the Preface to the 1978 edition of the aforementioned Hamerquist pamphlet, argues “there is no direct correspondence between degree of oppression and revolutionary potential.” Furthermore, STO clearly understood that oppressive social relations in a capitalist society are material, class-based ones and that the struggle against them must address the ‘distribution of life chances,’ to use a current phrase.
Urgent Tasks
Staudenmaier states, “[f]or an organization with a highly developed theoretical position on white supremacy and white skin privilege, it is perhaps surprising that STO was never able to formally resolve the practical question of whether it was multiracial or all-white.” Herein he illustrates the often-striking gulf that exists in revolutionary organizations between the richness of their ideas and their inability to put these into practice organizationally. Important for the diligent reader, Staudenmaier tells the story of STO’s interpersonal allegiances and factions. Herein we are provided a glimpse into the various complexities and struggles that take place within a revolutionary organization. Furthermore, by introducing the debates contained within various STO publications – which are available online at the STO digital archive (http://www.sojournertruth.net/) – the theoretical synthesis of such thinkers as Marx, DuBois, Lenin, Gramsci, James, and others are shown to confront the realities of the anti-war, workplace organizing, feminist, queer, anti-fascist, and anti-nuke movements. Those seeking a route out of the stasis of our post-counter-globalization and post-Occupy moment should turn, in part, to the reflections contained within Truth and Revolution lest we continue to repeat the debates and arguments of a previous cycle of struggle.
Reading the STO politically is Staudenmaier’s task. Our urgent task is reading the history of the STO, and parallel people’s histories, as we consider the current predicaments of our own revolutionary organizations.
August 12, 2024
Solid history of the only New Communist Movement group that came anywhere close to an actually communist orientation. It’s not well-known but it was a seedbed for a lot of the best - and some of the worst - aspects of the contemporary left; both STO’s autonomism and its Maoist-derived, ultra-representational, coalitional, nationalist approach to (national) oppression are everywhere today. This is the group that theorized and spread the concept of white skin privilege. At its best this is still an invaluable body of thinking for us today; at its most debased it’s the centerpiece of the chauvinistic, patronizing “privilege-checking” technocratic liberalism we’re all plagued with, although the STO veterans and their projects like Race Traitor never endorsed the liberal version of privilege theory. This is an excellent book for anyone looking to understand what needs trashing and what’s worth saving in the legacy of the 1960s-70s left.
August 28, 2019
One of the best books I have read about Left groups in the aftermath of the Sixties. The book contains many lessons for those who still are committed to radical social and economic changes in the United States. I feel I could spend the next year with a reading list that comes from this book.
I contrast this book with one that I read recently, a collection of oral histories of time spent in Progressive Labor Party and/or SDS/Student Worker Alliance. Overwhelmingly, people criticized how democratic centralism was used and how top down decisions were made. Sojouner Truth Organization rejected democratic centralism, rejected Stalinism while upholding Leninism, and made important and lasting contributions to understanding the role of white supremacy in dividing the working class in the United States.
Author Staudenmaier explains and criticizes actions Sojourner Truth made during its existence, and provides very useful footnotes throughout.
I contrast this book with one that I read recently, a collection of oral histories of time spent in Progressive Labor Party and/or SDS/Student Worker Alliance. Overwhelmingly, people criticized how democratic centralism was used and how top down decisions were made. Sojouner Truth Organization rejected democratic centralism, rejected Stalinism while upholding Leninism, and made important and lasting contributions to understanding the role of white supremacy in dividing the working class in the United States.
Author Staudenmaier explains and criticizes actions Sojourner Truth made during its existence, and provides very useful footnotes throughout.
August 27, 2012
If you have been involved with progressive or radical politics in the past 20 years, you may have been influenced by Sojourner Truth Organization, without knowing it! STO was a small national left group known for advancing the "white blind spot" as the fatal flaw in US social movements. They didn't just sit around and talk theory--the organized in factories as well. Very well written.
February 11, 2013
Probably one of the best books focusing on contemporary American radicalism I've ever read. Ok, now time to read it again and take notes for a future reading group!
October 13, 2021
Great, in depth look at a small group whose influence has far outmatched its size. It's been helpful to me in a variety of ways: understanding the post-SDS Marxist left, thinking about multiracial organizing, understanding how many contemporary and recent small groups throughout the left landed where they did. Also, as a recent transplant to Chicago, the book has allowed me to learn a bit about the last half century of radical politics in Chicago. The book shines when discussing workplace organizing strategies, especially in comparison to others, and in its discussion of the importance of racism and the black liberation movement for US history.
September 4, 2025
The history of an exceptionally eclectic group narrated by a sympathetic anarchist
It's a decent history, but overall an unpleasant read. I could also do without the author interjecting about anarchism where it wasn't relevant. I think their lack of background with Marxism is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to explaining the disagreements other Marxist groups at the time had with STO
It's a decent history, but overall an unpleasant read. I could also do without the author interjecting about anarchism where it wasn't relevant. I think their lack of background with Marxism is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to explaining the disagreements other Marxist groups at the time had with STO
April 18, 2020
About a New Communist organization that learns to value autonomy. Had key theoreticians of white skin privilege and dual consciousness. Couldn’t decide if they were Maoists or autonomen.
February 12, 2014
Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization is an alright book. Maybe I came into it with higher expectations thanks to the glowing recommendations of friends, but I wasn't terribly impressed with it.
The book can be summed up this way: The Sojourner truth Organization, emerging out of the student movement in the 60s, did some interesting practical and theoretical work on workplace organizing, workers autonomy and white skin privilege. Then they stopped practical workplace organizing and went from one thing to the other until they stopped. The end.
I don't know if it needs a 300+ page book to explain the history of a group that never was more then 100 people that never really succeeded in doing what it stated it wanted to do. There was allot of "in theory, the STO was different from other left groups of the time, but in practice there was little difference". I don't know what I can take out of it other then a basing an counterforce to white skin privilege in multiracial workplace struggles.
The book can be summed up this way: The Sojourner truth Organization, emerging out of the student movement in the 60s, did some interesting practical and theoretical work on workplace organizing, workers autonomy and white skin privilege. Then they stopped practical workplace organizing and went from one thing to the other until they stopped. The end.
I don't know if it needs a 300+ page book to explain the history of a group that never was more then 100 people that never really succeeded in doing what it stated it wanted to do. There was allot of "in theory, the STO was different from other left groups of the time, but in practice there was little difference". I don't know what I can take out of it other then a basing an counterforce to white skin privilege in multiracial workplace struggles.
October 5, 2014
started (fairly) strong, at least the back story and the knowledge of the organizing work being done was fresh. learning about noel ignatiev's earliest days and political evolution have been interesting and insightful. the analysis of white skin privilege as introduced by the STO. continue to be part of the prevailing discourse on the topic. but on the real, shit is boring. not just the day to day producing conflicting pamphlets to distro on the factory floor. but this writing style is dry, like tryna choke down a spoon of flour dry. i'mma still try and slog through this bitch, but it ain't on my list of high priorities any longer. shit was cool when i was riding the bus. now my whip is right, i can't spend that many hours reading hella boring prose.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews