The promise of workers’ power
The International Socialists perspectives debate, 1976–77
The recent publication of reflections by former members of the International Socialists (IS) and its youth group, Red Tide, is a welcome, if overdue, recollection of the successes and failures of building a socialist presence in key industries and among high school students in the United States in the 1970s.
From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor (Haymarket Books) offers first-hand accounts of those who sought to implement a rank-and-file strategy with varying degrees of success as they sought to bring socialism from below to key sectors of the U.S. working class.
Unfortunately, the opening for turning some of the militancy of that period into a socialist base was shut midway through the decade by global conditions that proved insurmountable for the IS, as well as the mass movements of that period.1 Largely missing from the collection, though, is the perspectives debate that tried to address how these material changes undercut the IS strategy, requiring an altered approach for building a socialist base. The debate is important because it gave birth to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose more measured perspective allowed it to carry forward the project of socialism from below during a decades-long working-class retreat.
Strategy under stress
The IS was founded in 1969 near the peak of nearly two decades of mass social movements and deepening radicalization. By the mid-1970s the conditions that gave rise to this period had changed. By 1976 it was becoming clear to some that the general perspectives and strategy that had guided the IS since its founding no longer fit. After a four-month debate with the IS majority over its “mass work” perspective en route to a “workers’ combat organization” and a deepening commitment to strategic implantation of comrades in key industries and unions, the minority, or Left Faction (LF), was expelled in the opening session of a Special Convention held in Detroit in March 1977. After the expulsion, 52 members of the LF convened at the Veterans’ Memorial Building to establish the framework of a new organization, the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The debate leading to the expulsion focused on strategy and tactics, not the foundational principles defining socialism from below.
Although the current period does not replicate the 1970s, there are many reasons that a new generation of socialists looks to the IS experience of building independent rank-and-file organizations in key industries and unions during the 1970s. Two current organizations—Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Labor Notes—are rooted in the IS work of that decade. Both reform organizations were supported by the LF/ISO from their beginning. So, why did the IS expel a third of its members in 1977? The arguments over the 1976–77 IS perspectives provide lessons that the current generation of socialists might find useful in their efforts to build organizations and to construct a perspective that fits the current period and avoids some of the mistakes of the past.
Mass movements prepare the way
It is important to understand the context that led to the founding of the IS in 1969. A mass movement for Black civil rights in the United States and an international antiwar movement against the U.S. imperial war in Vietnam pulled millions into radical activity. In addition, a second wave women’s rights and liberation movement emerged, followed by a movement for gay rights and liberation. These, too, had international links. But it was the uprising of students and the largest ever workers’ general strike in France in May 1968 that captured the imagination of a new generation of radicals looking for revolutionary possibilities. Besides the May events in France that nearly toppled the government, cracks in the Eastern bloc, anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and guerilla insurgencies in Latin America reinforced revolutionary aspirations.
The year 1968 was the watershed year of this period. Beginning with the Tet offensive by the National Liberation Front in Vietnam in late January, which exposed the lie that the U.S. military was winning its war there, and ending with the election of the Republican, Richard Nixon, to the presidency with a plurality of less than one percent of the vote, 1968 screamed for fundamental change. Between Tet and Nixon’s election came President Lyndon Johnson’s near abdication, two assassinations (Dr. Martin L. King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy), mass uprisings (France, Czechoslovakia), guerrilla struggles (Latin America), and wide disaffection with the Democratic Party after it nominated the war supporter and Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey to challenge Nixon. This turbulent year exposed many of the cracks in the international system of capitalist exploitation, which could no longer impose its will on the masses unopposed.
By the end of 1968, the search for how to organize for revolutionary change was well underway. A generation of activists informed by their experiences now looked for a blueprint, or at least a model, for how to make a revolution. Many looked to the Cuban and Chinese guerilla achievements for guidance. Others looked back to 1917 and the first successful worker-led revolution in Russia. Most of the models were top-down, substituting self-appointed leaders and organizations that would make the revolution for the masses. Working-class self-emancipation (Bolshevism) in Russia had been replaced by a bureaucratic and self-appointed ruling class (Stalinism).2 Reconnecting workers to the tradition of self-emancipation was never going to be easy, but it was worth a try in the context of mass social movements in the United States and Europe, as well as anti-colonial struggles in the South.
Following the breakup of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the summer of 1969, the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC) and remnants of several SDS chapters (Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Baltimore, Ann Arbor) met over Labor Day weekend that year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to lay the groundwork for a national organization. By the end of the year, convinced that the period of radicalization had entered a new stage, the IS was launched, setting its sights on joining the working class. What happened in the effort to build a revolutionary workers’ organization as the period of radicalization began to ebb over the next decade is a history that is both instructive and cautionary. It is the history of the International Socialists and its successor organizations, the ISO, and a third organization, Solidarity.
Revolution in the air
Before neoliberalism, globalization, or financialization entered the lexicon, workers in several sectors of the U.S. economy flexed their muscles—sometimes with their union’s blessing, more often in opposition to official leaderships. For the Left this period became known as the “rank-and-file rebellion.”3In tandem with a growing restlessness and outright insubordination in the military as the war in Vietnam dragged on, an upsurge of workers challenged the status quo and the post–World War II narrative of upward mobility and middle-class status.4 Soldiers who were drafted into a war they only half believed in came home to a country deeply divided. Beneath the flag-waving and imperial chest-thumping a new attitude was born.
The endless war in Vietnam, along with the drive for profits at home, produced a consciousness of resistance among many frontline soldiers and workers alike. A growing attitude emerged that challenged the bosses in factories and officers in Vietnam. Soldiers increasingly refused to follow dangerous orders for a war that seemed pointless (or which they opposed on political grounds). Officers who gave reckless orders became targets for fragging (battlefield assassination).5
In factories and warehouses resistance was often expressed individually through “work-to-rule” slowdowns rather than coordinated actions, but united unofficial strikes, often led by rank-and-file militants, were not uncommon. Wildcat strikes grew in this period, accounting for a third of work stoppages, with the 1970 postal strike being the largest (with more than 200,000 workers taking part). Miners struck several times in the decade without official notice and gave birth to Miners for Democracy to fight the corrupt Tony Boyle regime in the United Mine Workers.
Between 1968 and 1971, strikes and labor reform movements reached historic proportions. In auto plants, Black-led shop floor organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) fought the company on the factory floor and racism in the union. Even during the 1974 recession there were nearly as many strikes as in the peak year of 1970.6
Against this background a revolutionary current emerged. Elements of this current could be found in the early sixties, but it was the watershed year of 1968 when the radicalization broke explosively into the open internationally.7 Millions of young radicals began to draw revolutionary conclusions from their experiences. It was now time to create the organizations necessary to effectively challenge the status quo of war, hunger, and inequality. Revolution was certainly in the air and nourished a generation eager for change. The May events in France suggested that rebellion was growing in the working class—the material force capable of challenging the capitalist system.
Berkeley ISC leaves campus for the factory floor
The Independent Socialists at the University of California, Berkeley under the leadership of the Marxist scholar Hal Draper was the dominant Left organization there in the 1960s, and played a leading role in civil rights, free speech, and peace movements. Loosely affiliated with ISC groups in Chicago, New York, Ann Arbor, and Baltimore—many of whose members had been comrades in the Young People’s Socialist League and the Student Peace Union—the Berkeley ISC student leaders Joel Geier and Mike Parker determined it was time to establish a national revolutionary organization committed to the principles of workers’ self-emancipation: workers’ control of their workplaces, a government democratically elected from councils of workers, and a movement of workers tied to “neither Washington nor Moscow,” but to international socialism. This socialism-from-below orientation differentiated the ISC/IS from most of the emerging revolutionary groups that identified with the so-called actually existing socialist states of China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. In the end, it was Maoism that attracted the largest following of the 1970s radicals in the United States.
With the inspiration of the French May, and cracks in the Eastern bloc coinciding with the breakup of SDS in 1969, Geier and Parker broke with Draper, who believed that a national organization was unsustainable and that the period of radicalization had peaked.8 Further, he considered their rank-and-file strategy to be effectively dual unionism and therefore divisive. Meeting over Labor Day 1969, with representatives from various student clubs (including the ISC) and SDS affiliates, the foundation for a national organization was outlined.9 By the end of 1969 the IS had coalesced with a perspective to move off the campuses and join the industrial working class. Toward that goal, Detroit was chosen as the national headquarters and a monthly paper, Workers’ Power, would lead the way.
While it would take a series of internal arguments to cohere the organization, by 1973 the IS was on its way to carrying out its perspective of implementing the rank-and-file strategy.10 The implementation rested on getting jobs in key industries: auto, steel, telephone, and trucking (freight and parcel) were the initial priorities, followed by postal workers in the wake of their impressive wildcat strike. The plan was to establish rank-and-file caucuses in the affiliated unions and to cohere a group of workers who would be a pole for a new kind of orientation,workers’ control of the workplace.11 This would necessarily involve challenging the existing union leaderships that operated under the principle of business unionism—collaboration with the bosses—which had been firmly established in the post–World War II era.
In brief, the perspective of sending students into strategic industries, building opposition groups in unions, and educating a layer of worker-militants to commit to socialism was a monumental undertaking for an organization of less than 300 members. Nevertheless, with commitment high, promising objective conditions, and some early, if modest, successes in locating like-minded workers, any doubts about the strategy were marginalized.
Successes drive the perspective
One measure of success was the number of rank-and-file organizations built in the targeted industries. By 1975, there were four auto caucuses, five Teamster rank-and-file newspapers, and three caucuses in telephone and steel. In addition, teachers in New York and the Bay Area were active in opposition groups in their respective unions. With the help of a targeted pamphlet, The Struggle for Workers’ Power!, and regular Workers’ Power paper sales at main post offices, several postal workers joined the IS in this period.
A significant breakthrough came in 1976 with the Master Freight Agreement (MFA) campaign, led by Teamsters for a Decent Contract, an ad-hoc group of IS implants and fellow militants in the freight industry, as well as United Parcel Service (UPS) workers. The campaign was spread through rank-and-file newspapers and organizations to some twenty cities, and successfully established a national opposition group in the Teamsters Union that materially helped shape a contract outside official union channels.
This success led to a national rank-and-file organization, TDU, launched in September 1976. Its main orientation targeted both local and national leaderships of the Teamsters, offering a rank-and-file alternative. TDU soon established itself as the main reform group in the Teamsters Union and the organization to affiliate with if you wanted to challenge entrenched leaderships in your local.
In tandem with TDU, embedded IS women working at UPS in Cleveland launched their own organization: UPSurge. Based on their experience, they targeted the company rather than the union leadership with a newspaper, UPSurge, and built opposition groups among drivers and package loaders. Their success in the Midwest brought them in touch with a rank-and-file group in Louisville, Kentucky, that boosted UPSurge’s credibility among Teamsters. Targeting company bosses instead of union heads eventually led to friction within the IS Teamster fraction and became a sharp divide in the perspectives debate in 1976–77.
Successes mask underlying conditions
By the time of the 1976 National Convention in July, the IS could point to several successes in implementing the overall labor strategy. Not only had the freight workers been instrumental in building a successful national contract fight, but in the process they had established a viable national rank-and-file organization, TDU. That success led to a handful of key rank-and-file leaders joining the IS, though few stuck beyond the formation of TDU, especially as an economic recession took hold, leading to layoffs and a dampening of militancy. The mass civil rights movements and women’s and gay liberation movements also were forced to retreat to defend their gains.
Independent rank-and-file organizations were replicated in other targeted industries around the country: telephone workers in New York, Louisville, and Seattle, autoworkers in Detroit, California, and New Jersey, steelworkers in Gary and Pittsburgh, and UPS workers in multiple cities showed what was possible. Overall, the successes covered over the many objective and subjective difficulties that were beginning to erode nearly two decades of militancy and protest. As from a flea on the back of an elephant, the view from a limited vista did not produce a picture of the whole animal. The ride was thrilling, but the destination could not be strategically determined with the small forces at hand, despite the high-level of commitment from IS comrades. Nevertheless, the leadership of the IS was prepared to claim success for its perspective at its 1976 Convention in Dearborn, Michigan, and take the next step—mass work.
Misreading the tea leaves
While there were many implementations of the rank-and-file perspective of which the IS could be proud, they were not sufficient to declare victory. Nevertheless, at the 1976 Convention held in the ballroom of the Dearborn Hilton, the national leadership declared that the IS was ready for the “next step in our mass work perspective… In mass work on shopfloors and around economic issues, we try to give a lead to the backward, reactionary, and cowardly workers as well as to the militants.”12
From an orientation on the “militant minority” to a declaration that the IS was now ready to do “mass work” with a membership no larger than 342 (according to the 1976 National Secretary report), raises the question: Who was leading whom? This triumphalist assessment of the organization’s accomplishments suggested that nothing was wrong with the overall perspectives outlined in the 1975 IS pamphlet The Struggle for Workers’ Power, which boldly projected that in the 1976–77 bargaining round,
[W]e will become a workers’ combat group in the lead of a growing rank-and-file movement or be set back severely.
…By three years from now we want [the workers] to be the leadership of the IS, and a working class and black leadership, which has already started the process of constructing factory branches.
We want to double our membership by the next convention [1976]. In the next 2-3 years, we want to have the core of a party—worker cadres, factory branches, national rank and file movements, a weekly paper, a theoretical journal, a strong youth group, and a working class and black leadership.
This outline for the next period was far ahead of the concrete achievements and completely overlooked the material forces at hand. Even if the membership had doubled by 1976, it would still be well short of the numbers needed to carry out these tasks. Indeed, many at the 1976 convention felt that militancy was beginning to wane, though to voice caution without a clear alternative would have led to isolation, or worse. According to National Secretary Glenn Wolf, adherence to the “Workers Combat” perspective would become a condition of membership.13
Radical period begins to ebb
Internationally much had changed since the founding of the IS. By 1974, the Portuguese revolution was in abeyance and in Chile the socialist government had been crushed by a military coup with the help of the CIA. In 1975, the US retreated from Vietnam, thus ending the antiwar movement. The Black Power movement, which gave rise to the Black Panther Party in 1966, was under physical attack as early as 1969 from local and national law enforcement and was slowly being driven to the margins. An Indigenous movement was literally gunned down by federal agents in South Dakota in 1973. These early warnings signaled that defending and building movements would require a growth in solidarity not seen since 1968.
Even the promise of workers’ power seen in the numerous wildcat strikes and other forms of resistance to the boss’s relentless drive for profits was beginning to wane. An economic downturn in 1973–75 and corresponding layoffs had already weakened militancy in the manufacturing sector.14
Domestically, the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976 signaled a shift from the pro-labor Roosevelt era to a program of deregulation and a neoliberal agenda favoring profits at the expense of workers’ needs. Layoffs soon became the norm as capital looked for cheaper locations to retool, either overseas or in the non-union south. Neoliberalism replaced New Dealism as the framework for exploitation, producing a consciousness of self-preservation rather than a spirit of rebellion and solidarity in workplaces.
In retrospect, it is clear now that the IS perspective had reached its limits by 1976. The leadership’s assessment at the Convention that year exaggerated successes and projected a triumphant period ahead. While there were doubters at that convention, they were unprepared to challenge the perspective openly. They did, however, begin to lay the groundwork for a counter-narrative, which would culminate in a formal factional challenge later that fall.
Employer’s offensive
Before turning to the debate that challenged the IS leadership’s perspective, it is important to note the fundamental shift of capital that was underway by the mid-1970s. No longer was capital prepared to invest in the old manufacturing systems, especially in steel, communications, transportation, and auto. The international challenge from one-time foes Japan and Germany forced U.S. manufacturers to close old production systems and seek new locations to retool for profitability.
In the heartland of U.S. manufacturing from St. Louis to Boston, factories and mills were shuttered, giving rise to what became known as “the rust belt.” Jobs that had once given many workers a middle-class life disappeared. International competition for profits now dominated. Workers, especially in the heartland, were the victims. From the promise of a home, a couple of cars, and college for the children, manufacturing workers suddenly found themselves on the dole.
Known as “the employers’ offensive,” this period not only wreaked havoc on manufacturing workers’ lives, but reverberated throughout the working class. Restaurant workers who catered to auto workers, for example, lost their jobs. Detroit, the city built by the auto industry, lost more than 300,000 residents, or 20 percent of its population, in the 1970s. When mortgages couldn’t be paid, whole blocks of houses were abandoned and fell into disrepair, thus hollowing out the city. Weed patches replaced yards, and one-third of schools were shuttered.
Besides the damage inflicted by corporate restructuring, Carter and Congress legislated pro-capital measures to assist in this restructuring. For example, removing regulations on telephone, airlines, and trucking gave rise to cutthroat competition and lower wages. Jobs that moved to the south, where new auto plants were built, were now union free. Wages fell by more than half. Frustrated resistance often turned against foreigners (primarily Asians) for “taking American jobs,” thus replacing solidarity with xenophobia.
By 1980, with the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, the rout of labor was well underway. To drive home the point that a new era had arrived, Reagan fired striking air traffic-controllers in 1981. Organized labor’s response was to rally in Washington, DC with more than 400,000 workers eager to challenge Reagan’s anti-worker assault. Unfortunately, official union leaderships looked not to solidarity on the picket line, but rather to a march to the ballot box to elect Democrats to Congress in 1982, ignoring the fact that it was a Democrat in the White House six years earlier who had ushered in the offensive against workers. Not only was this a blow to any meaningful resistance to the employer’s offensive, but it initiated doubts in the viability of workers to bring about positive social change through their own initiative.
Warning signals begin to pile up
Yet even before Reagan and the full extent of the employer’s offensive was known, some in the IS began to see the limits of the group’s perspective, especially in its aim of building a “workers’ combat organization” through “mass work.” One clue to these limits seemed obvious to the UPSurge comrades. While UPSurge had built an impressive rank-and-file organization, especially in the Midwest, it was not strong enough to meet the Teamster leadership’s threat to help the bosses fire workers who continued their wildcat strike in 1976.
But it was more than the weakness of UPSurge that signaled the limits of the IS perspective. It was the material pressures on the industrial cadre to adapt to their work environment that exposed the limits of implantation, especially as militancy waned and U.S. manufacturing retooled. Consciousness was shifting away from militancy and solidarity toward self-preservation and adaptation to the emerging neoliberal conditions.
Not comfortable with the exaggerated assessment of the IS leadership at the 1976 convention, and with some prodding interventions from Canadian comrades in attendance, several IS cadre began to question the road ahead. At first, these were informal gatherings of a handful of comrades who mostly asked questions: Why were we only able to recruit a few militants from our rank-and-file work? Why were Workers’ Power sales declining? Are we missing struggles apart from the targeted industries that might be more receptive to our politics? In the wake of the convention several comrades were unconvinced of the strategic role of the mass work perspective and the leadership’s insistence on sticking to the strategy of implantation in strategic industries when layoffs were the order of the day.
Two leading members, Cal Winslow, the industrial organizer, and Barbara Winslow, the women’s organizer, were alarmed by the exaggerated perspective and sought guidance from comrades they had worked with in the British IS in Coventry in 1969. Early in September 1976, the Winslows headed for London, where they met with leaders of the British IS, newly named the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Here they learned that the British were also alarmed at the IS’s exaggerated industrial perspectives.
Upon returning, the Winslows approached several comrades to determine if a formal opposition should be organized to raise concerns about the mass work perspective. With fifty-eight initial endorsers, the Left Faction assembled in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in early November. Twenty-two members attended the first meeting, along with two comrades from the Canadian IS who had witnessed the debate at the Dearborn convention. A Red Tide representative also attended.
The discussions at this first meeting led to the commission of three documents: “A New Course for the IS,” “Women’s Liberation,” and “Black Liberation.” A later document addressed the Portuguese Revolution, charging the leadership with an exaggerated assessment of the Portuguese Revolutionary Party’s strategy. However, most of the discussion held in branches throughout the four months of debate that followed centered on the leadership’s insistence on doubling down on mass work and sending comrades into the targeted industries even though hiring was at a near standstill.
The Left Faction perspective
On December 8, 1976, the Left Faction submitted a counter-perspective, “The New Course for the IS.”15 The twenty-two-page document opened with the following assessment: “We believe the IS is in a deep crisis. The organization’s perspectives have failed. The organization’s politics and policies are shifting to the right.”
Countering the leadership’s assessment that the IS was ready to take the next step toward “a workers’ combat organization,” the LF offered a grim appraisal of the primary areas of work. The auto fraction submitted a sobering report: “We recruited and held no one from the plants in the past nine months. In the same period, we lost a number of members” (p. 6). The telephone fraction efforts were going nowhere and “there is deep demoralization and confusion among those who carry on.” From the steel fraction: “There is dissension in the fraction” (p. 7).
Even amid the major successes—the National Master Freight Contract campaign, the founding of TDU, and the UPSurge-led wildcat strike—the leadership admitted that the IS presence had been “liquidated for a prolonged period of time.” In concrete terms this meant that Workers’ Power had ceased to be integral to the activity of building rank-and-file organizations. The “New Course” charged, “More and more the organization takes on the characteristics of a ‘sect’ in its isolated existence, its frenzied activity, its endless internal meetings, its big talk, to no listeners” (pp. 4-5).
The document went on to argue that the IS’s strategy for building a revolutionary socialist current in the U.S. working class by taking jobs in key industries and challenging do-nothing union leaders was a “substitutionist” perspective that had led to a conservatized and demoralized cadre. Further, it challenged that objective conditions were ignored, thus making any weaknesses or failures of the mass work perspective “the fault or short comings of the members: a voluntarist load that has crushed many fine comrades” (p. 9).
Whether or not the LF’s assessment of the leadership’s perspective was exaggerated, it nevertheless was a strong indicator that a debate was in order, especially considering the unease among most members in the organization that recruitment had virtually ceased. This fact was especially disconcerting when “mass work” became the description for all IS initiatives, no matter how minor.
The LF argued that the leadership’s adherence to a mass work perspective was confusing: “The IS cannot have it all ways. It cannot, at the same time, orient to the left bureaucracy, and to the ‘cowards and reactionaries’ in the rank and file, and also to the militant minority, in particular to the special demands and struggles of the oppressed” (p. 8).
Black and women’s issues were often lost when adhering to the tenets of mass work. In practice the mass work perspective strengthened “the conservative tendencies already strong in our industrial work.” In other words, the IS was missing its audience.
The principle of “every factory must be our fortress” that “must be the key to building a successful revolutionary workers’ party” (p. 10) in the long run, was acknowledged by the LF, but, they argued, “To reduce the question to one of white-collar vs. blue-collar or workers vs. students misses opportunities in the short-term, especially when conditions have changed.” In addition, “There is no way that a group of 300 can either chart the course of the class struggle, nor can it expect to impose ‘consistency’ on history” (p. 11).
The IS was substituting itself for the lack of militancy among the workers of industries it had chosen as key to the class struggle. Both the mass work perspective and the focus on strategic economic sectors were stand-ins for the real struggles of workers, wherever they might break out. By not coming to grips with the objective conditions, argued the LF, opportunities were being missed to build the organization. Many industrialized members in the targeted sectors, let alone long-time militants, were exhausted and demoralized. “Industrialization conservatizes the individual members and leads to conservatism in the entire organization. It focuses the attention of the organization not on the working class, but on its own middle-class members,” the LF noted. In short, “industrialization is a pessimistic, conservative and a substitutionist strategy” (p. 15).
Perhaps the most serious charge leveled at the leadership’s perspective was that, despite the rhetoric of being “best fighters for Black liberation,” there was little concrete attention paid to Black struggles, nor to training the few Black people who had joined the organization. In fact, the most serious Black work was left to Red Tide, which led a campaign to free a framed Black student, Gary Tyler, from a specious shooting charge. The LF believed it was the adherence to seeking jobs in targeted industries strategy that hampered a consistent plan for Black work, or for that matter, serious women’s work.
By 1976, there was plenty of evidence that the IS perspective had run its course and was only being maintained through a “pseudo-bolshevism” and a perverted interpretation of “democratic centralism”—orders from the leadership without the political backing sufficient to convince the membership that it was on the right track.
In reality, the perspective developed over the life of the organization had ceased to either attract new recruits to the IS or inspire many of its most committed adherents in the organization. It was time to change course.
Key to the perspective advocated by the LF was Workers’ Power, arguing that the small size of the IS required it to maximize its resources with concrete propaganda. Rather than tailing “a nonexistent ‘mass’ audience, at the lowest common denominator,” the paper must be “directed to the advanced workers, those in struggle” wherever they might be—not necessarily in predetermined industries. Furthermore, the paper could prove in practice how real democratic centralism works, when “it actually carries our political ideas” and is used as “our chief interventionist tool” (p. 20).
The LF proposed an outward-looking strategy: “It must turn to the actual struggles of the working class. The IS must develop local perspectives based on the actual conditions in each city and workplace” (p. 21). As the LF pointed out, the best guide for revolutionaries, especially with small numbers, can be found in Farrell Dobbs’ books of the Minneapolis Teamster’s struggles of 1933–34. The LF saw the Communist League’s approach in the 1930s as a model for the IS.
The SWP-UK intervenes
Even before the LF was organized or produced documents, the Central Committee of the British IS/SWP raised the alarm in a six-page letter to the National Committee of the IS in September. The main thrust of its concern was the “triumphalist” assessment of the national Teamsters contract campaign, as well as other efforts in building rank-and-file organizations. They cautioned against the immodesty and exaggeration of the leadership’s perspectives. In blunt terms they also dismissed the focus on strategic industries.
To drive the point home, they offered James Cannon’s observation on the first real success of Trotskyists in the United States:
Our comrades in Minneapolis began their work in the coal yards and later extended their organizing campaign away from the general drivers and helpers. That was not a preconceived plan worked out in the general staff of our movement. The drivers of Minneapolis were not by far the most decisive section of the American proletariat. We began our real activity in the labor movement in those places where the opportunity was open to us. It is not possible to select such occasions arbitrarily according to whim or preference. One must enter a mass movement where a door is open.
In short, the letter argued that the leadership’s perspective was “grossly exaggerated” and was in danger of driving the organization “into increasingly false political positions in an attempt to conceal what will become a growing gulf between pretensions and reality.” Unfortunately, this intervention from a fraternal organization was characterized as traitorous, thus branding any opposition as hostile to the IS project even before the LF emerged.
Was a split necessary?
Was the LF’s call for a new strategy so out of bounds that the majority needed to jettison nearly a third of its membership? In retrospect the split seems indefensible, especially given the conditions of the period and the collapse of the IS less than two years after the debate.
By the end of the four-month debate, both sides were exhausted and ready to move on. In lieu of expulsion (Item 1 of the Special Convention Agenda), the LF proposed a seven-point resolution to avoid a split, including disbanding the LF and accepting the majority perspective without demanding positions on the Executive Committee, even though it represented a third of the organization. Behind the scenes, though, including an Executive Committee meeting with an IS/SWP representative, it was clear that the two sides were ready to go their separate ways and prove in practice their perspectives.
It should also be noted that a small middle faction (Workers’ Power) argued for a compromise. This group, which included the well-known Teamster rank-and-file leader Pete Camarata, left the IS a year later. Soon after, the IS ceased to exist.
Conditions determined perspectives post-split
The guiding politics of “socialism from below” as a principle for revolutionary organization was never in question by any of the contending forces, only how to implement it under unpredictable conditions.
While the IS continued into the mid-1980s (and founded Labor Notes in 1979), its paper Workers Power ceased publishing in October 1978. The ISO and its paper Socialist Worker survived for 42 years and grew to be what was, perhaps, the largest revolutionary Left organization in the United States during the period of long retreat. The ISO strategy focused on campuses, especially those with an activist core. For example, anti-apartheid in South Africa and anti-Gulf War struggles helped radicalize students post-1970s. Through this strategy the ISO was able to introduce student activists to the occasional worker struggles that emerged during the 1990s such as the Caterpillar tractor and Staley sugar strikes in central Illinois and the Hormel meatpacker’s strike in Minnesota.
Several years after the IS collapsed, some of its members, along with recently expelled members of the Socialist Workers Party (US), launched the organization Solidarity, with a perspective of regrouping sections of the Left committed to struggles from below.16 Solidarity continues to operate as a small socialist feminist organization with a bimonthly magazine, Against the Current.
For any organization aspiring to cohere the self-activity of workers, the lessons—good and bad—from the IS’s decade of trying to build rank-and-file organizations are worth examining. However, the internal debate that concluded that period is integral to understanding the full IS story.
Conditions had significantly changed since the IS’s beginning, and the organization had neither the numbers nor the influence needed to carry its ambitious perspectives forward. In some ways, the IS was a victim of its successes, which blinded it to forces much more decisive than a handful of militant rank-and-file organizations and their socialist backers.
One lesson that stands out from the successes and failures of the IS in the 1970s is the need to temper revolutionary objectives with a measure of modesty. The accomplishments of the IS are inspiring and instructive, but overestimating those accomplishments was fatal for the organization.
Nevertheless, as From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor illustrates, the comrades of the IS, who gave it their all, found the decade they joined the rank-and-file upsurge a meaningful part of their lives, rich with lessons for the current generation of socialists.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Rafaelgr; modified by Tempest.
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Bill Roberts is a longstanding socialist based in Chicago, Illinois.